Those were exciting times indeed.
Posted on 10/7/2007, 4:50:42 PM by Chi-townChief
Rare are the times when a community, a nation, a world can say without hyperbole, "The future starts today." But that was the wondrous development 50 years ago last Thursday when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to go beyond Earth's atmosphere and orbit the planet.
Sputnik is the first world event I remember. In Miss Kempter's 2nd-grade class, I realized this was a big deal when she took time from our usual lessons to sketch a picture of Sputnik on the blackboard. A basketball-shaped object with spikes coming out its sides was what everyone was discussing on television and in the newspapers.
The Space Age had started, and not in the technically advanced United States but in the supposedly backward USSR.
How could this happen? How did the Soviet Union get ahead of the richest and supposedly smartest nation on Earth? Though Sputnik might not have surprised some in the U.S. government and the scientific community, most of the American public was shocked.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Most of the excitement and dismay and visions of spending opportunity were in Washington DC.
Apparently that's as far as he got intellectually.
That I can recall, I have not seen a man landing on the moon
being given notice on Google, however this event was.
Bias, what bias.
And he’s now the copy boy for the Tribune sports desk.
I remember being 10 years old, and standing in the dark in my Grandfather’s back yard, and getting a real strong tingle, and the hairs on the back of my neck standing up as I watched that darned thing. Creeped me out! My Dad had worked for the NACA, now NASA, during WW2, so our family was pretty into this kinda stuff.
It wasn’t such a shock since Vanguard had been hyped so much. Vanguard had become kind of a joke already. What really messed up space exploration was that the Russians launched their Cosmonaut soon after. If they had stuck to satellites only, the USA wouldn’t have got so deep into manned programs, including walking on the moon.
The Vanguard failures used to really pi$$ my old man off!
Actually I was alive, a junior in HS, when sputnik was launched. All it did was piss off the citizens of the US to the point the pushed the president and the legislature to get our space program in gear. We our the only country to have put men on the moon, for what it’s worth(and I think it is worth a lot).
I remember that night well, even though I was only 11 years old. My family was in our 1955 Ford riding into town and I was in the back seat looking out the rear window trying to catch a glimpse of sputnik passing overhead.
All of a sudden the inside of the car lit up for a fraction of a second and I yelled “I saw it, I saw it”. My dad couldn’t control his laughter when he told me he had just bumped the toggle switch on the spotlight attached to the drivers side of the door, and that was the light I saw.
Still laughing about it 50 years later!
About twenty years ago I was visiting the Aerospace Museum near the George C Marshall Space Center in Huntsville Alabama. I was peering into a display cabinet of memorabilia related to Werner Von Braun. His NASA badge was a tattered mess while his Peenmunde badge was in pristine condition. I made a loud comment about this.
A heavily German accented voice behind me said, "Because we were never afraid the NASA security people would shoot us for losing or damaging our badge, unlike the SS guards at our facility."
I had a grand conversation after that, you might imagine.
Basically, Russian scientists were under considerable duress for a quick success. It usually involved the conditions of the facilities housing their families.
Our immediate post-war efforts in strategic atomic delivery systems were centered on the manned bomber. The B-36, B-47, and B-52 programs. Supercarriers to operate A-3s. The communists worked on missiles instead. So of course they were ahead - in missiles.
As a delivery system, the SS-6 was in all ways inferior to our bombers of the period. But it was better suited to useless press stunts like tossing dogs (and later steppe peasants) high in the air.
This is misleading.
The rocket technology was imported from Germany. After the WWII the Russians and Americans "captured" Nazi V2 rocket engineers and scientists at Peenemünde.
We got Werner Von Braun's team which was predominantly "Systems Engineers". The Russians got the "Propulsion Engineers".
Each discipline is necessary but they have different priorities.
Thank you for correcting me. They had stolen the technology by then.
I remember watching it, too. Now I find out that the fast moving flickering light was actually the empty booster rocket. However, Sputnik or not, everything was different after that. Science was emphasized much more than before. In school and in the media. They even had Walt Disney make cartoons about getting into space and eventually, to the moon. Those who were not there can belittle it, but it was a big thing for those of us who lived through it.
Not much of a correction, anyone who calls the communists backwards has it pretty much right to begin with. Just fleshing it out.
Those were exciting times indeed.
And one month later the Russians tortured a dog in outerspace by slowing cooking him with solar radiation.
Oh, great glory to the Stalinist nation.
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