There weren’t any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

Phillips is underscoring how recent the “space age” is within living memory: in his childhood, the very category of “astronaut” did not yet exist. By anchoring the moment to Yuri Gagarin’s first human spaceflight (April 1961), he frames space exploration as a sudden historical rupture that reshaped what children could imagine as possible careers and futures. The remark also conveys a generational perspective—those who grew up alongside the earliest milestones experienced spaceflight not as established history but as unfolding news, which can intensify a sense of wonder and personal connection to later achievements in aerospace and science.