Today marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin‘s historic space flight in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, which made the Soviet cosmonaut the first human in space. During a 108-minute flight on April 12, 1961, Gagarin was the first human to escape Earth’s gravity and achieve orbit.

Each year, this milestone is celebrated around the globe with Yuri’s Night, which this year includes 500 parties in 72 countries on 6 continents. There’s various types of parties — some are free, others are ticketed — which can range from intimate gatherings to galas with over 10,000 attendees, with several Observatories hosting events, as well as one at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Visit the Yuri’s Night Events List page to find a party in your area.

Space Shuttle Discovery is finishing up its final mission, a 13-day visit to the International Space Station. The ship will make its final landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday after which it will be retired. For those of us who have grown up with Discovery, it’s a little sad to see it retire.

Each morning, a special song usually picked by their families awakens the astronauts on board. For this last mission NASA decided to hold an online contest to allow fans to pick the songs. Nearly 2.5 million votes were cast between August 20, 2010 and November 1, 2010 Alexander Courage‘s theme song to the original Star Trek television series was the second most popular song of the ones available getting 671,133 votes or 27.2% of the total votes.

CBS Consumer Products and Mad Science have officially announced that a brand new interactive stage show based on the world of Star Trek will make its debut at the Kennedy Space Center this June.

The show will present the best young recruits of the Starfleet Academy on their first day as they try and learn about space travel, living and working in space, and the science and technologies they’ll be using. The show will run 30 minutes and deliver a bunch of special effects, some interaction with the audience, and a lot of very cool space technologies we really use.