Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Wednesday, October 03, 2007 7:10:23 AM
OCTOBER 3, 2007 -- This week those of us old enough to remember the beginning of the Space Race are quietly celebrating something todays college students do not even know ever happened. Fifty years ago on Friday, Sputnik (Russian for *Fellow Traveller*) was launched into space, beating the American efforts which routinely blew up on the launch pad in full view of the world. The little beep of the basketball sized satellite was not only first goal to the Russkies, it was a wake up call to the students of America to get their math and science skills in order and catch up with the world.
I remember going outside at our beach house (later it was swallowed by Hurricane Frederick) at night and standing with the family and a lot of other beach house tenants to watch both Sputnik and Vanguard pass by overhead. That was when people still looked up when planes flew over, not with dread but with interest. I had wanted to be an astronaut until I was told in Grade 5 that Girls could not be anything; I had a Sears Roebuck Planetarium that projected space onto my bedroom walls and ceiling, and I had books by Willey Ley and Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and I dreamed of piloting the shuttle between the great wheeling Chesley Bonesell space station and the chunky, clunky interplanetary liners that orbited just beyond, and looking down upon the wheeling green place below. I was in a bar in Italy when Apollo 12 landed on the Moon, and we Americans happily shared the experience with everyone else -- it was Mankind (still an acceptable word) that hit that golf ball and drove that little Lunar Lander up there.
Unfortunately America lost her nerve in the Sixties, when the only thing that mattered was sex, drugs, bad music and tearing things down, and if anybody ever goes back to the Moon, it will be Richard Branson or the Chinese. I took my kids to see Apollo 13 when it came out and they did not even know it had really happened just that way. The average college student has no idea that anybody has ever walked on the moon. In another generation, the college students will not even recognize the Moon. They will be scrambling in the dirt for scraps from the government table and trying to find new ways to degrade one another, I suppose.
Only a cynic would point out, I suppose, that if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, giving LBJ the impetus to ram his Legacy through, we probably never would have left the gravitational field of the Earth. Looking up at Sputnik coursing through the skies fifty years ago, I little knew what that siren song meant to the world. Think about this, too. Your kids with their iPods jammed in their ears and cranked up so high that they cannot hear a train whistle behind them would have missed the whole thing.