50 Years

It has been nearly 50 years since the launching of Sputnik, and even today it's hard to imagine the enormity of the event:

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same again — in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species.

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, a new moon, on Oct. 4, 1957. Climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well, rising above the atmosphere and into orbit, Sputnik crossed the threshold into a new dimension of human experience. People could now see their kind as spacefarers. Their enhanced mobility might someday prove as liberating as the first upright steps of hominid ancestors long ago.

The immediate reaction, though, reflected the dark concerns of a world in the grip of the cold war, a time of fear and division in which the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, stared each other down with the menace of mass destruction. Sputnik altered the nature and scope of the cold war....

...The Russians clearly intended Sputnik as a ringing statement of their technological prowess and its military implications. But even they, it seems, had not foreseen the frenzied response their success provoked.

Read the whole fascinating thing. Compare the reactions from 1957 it to the ho-hum reaction to the Chinese launching their first astronaut into orbit a few years back. Can you imagine what the reaction would be today to an event of such magnitude, say a surprise Chinese expedition to Mars? Would the be such wonder?, Would there be such fear? Would the administration launch and immediate plan to put a man on Mars in a hurry (and would protesters complain about Bush's demonic plan to conquer a sovereign planet?)

It is amazing to think that a government run program actually went from ideas on a blackboard of launching an inanimate object into space to landing a man on the Moon in 12 years. But given NASA's current propensity for mismanagement and cost overruns, the future of meaningful space travel will likely fall with private industry. But that does not mean that the lessons from Sputnik are not worth reliving, sharing, and considering as we move forward with the next fifty years of space exploration.