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Fifty-four years ago today (Oct. 4), the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, and humanity's race into space began. Now a weeklong international space celebration marks that date and highlights all the good that has come from reaching for the stars. The 12th annual World Space Week kicks off today, with organizations around the globe holding events to acknowledge the contributions of space science and technology to life on Earth. This year's festivities will focus on the theme "50 Years of Human Spaceflight," a nod to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic orbital flight of April 12, 1961.

It's a sign of how tinny and uninspiring President Obama's State of the Union address was that a week later it all seems so forgettable. Let's see, there was something about high-speed rail and a lot more spending ("investing," in Washington-speak). There was the theme, "Winning the Future," a term that apparently focus-grouped so well that nobody in the White House bothered to look up the fact that Newt Gingrich has written a book by the same title and all but copyrighted the buzz-phrase. And then there was all that stuff about Sputnik. The president insisted, as he has done...

. Rowen Gaither Jr. advised the great men of his era. He helped found RAND, the original U.S. think tank. He headed the Ford Foundation and served on numerous presidential committees. Ultimately, President Eisenhower tabbed him to chair an independent assessment of America's national security needs. For once, Ike got more than he asked for. The Gaither report argued for an astronomical increase in defense spending to fight the Cold War. As if to underscore its recommendations, the Soviets launched Sputnik just weeks before Gaither delivered his report to the Oval Office. After watching the Soviets win the "space race,"...

One of the difficulties progressives face is trying to make centralized planning sound like a good idea. Even the president, with all his rhetorical genius and majestic vagueness, can struggle with the task. So from time to time, it's important to mold history a bit to, you know, make a point. Early on in his State of the Union, for instance, President Barack Obama reminisced of an age when "good jobs" meant "showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown." A time when you "didn't always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your...

Instapundit notes that Soviet space expert James Oberg supports Governor Palin’s comments on Sputnik: I’m seeing up close how “Palin Derangement Syndrome” can compel otherwise intelligent people to foam at the mouth and babble nonsense to prove they’re right and she’s wrong. The historical view is that the early Soviet victories in the Space Race led to the US response of the Apollo program, whose triumph validated the superiority of US space technology — which had profound diplomatic, military, commercial, and cultural consequences. When Reagan challenged the USSR with Strategic Defense in the 1980s, Apollo had given that challenge credibility...

The Washington Post, which never passes up an opportunity to attack Sarah Palin, has gone after her for criticizing President Barack Obama’s “Sputnik” reference in the State of the Union Address. Palin noted accurately that what Obama was calling for was “big government” as the solution to our problems. She further pointed out big government socialistic solutions are what in part did the Soviet empire in. Those comments sent Steve Stromberg at the Washington Post into a hyperbolic fit, declaring that her analysis is “weird.” But his response indicates that he knows as little about the Soviet Union and Sputnik...

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In this post, I defer to my father, Charles Husson, who spent 30 years at NASA’s Langley Research Center as a systems engineer and program manager. From launching test payloads off Wallops Island, VA, in the late 1950′s to troubleshooting the Viking I Lander in the late 1970′s, and subsequently on loan to the Defense Department from NASA in the 80′s, he has been on the cutting edge of technology and has a unique view of how government and industry worked together to move this country into true “high-tech.” He was particularly fired up about one comment Obama made during...

Good speech for a Rethuglican. That's the consensus of the DUmmies on the Compromiser-in-Chief and his State of the Eunuch snoozefest last night. It was Obama's Nudnik Moment: The erstwhile Anointed One has become the Annoying One. Many threads to choose from; for now we'll go with . . . this THREAD, "So far, it's a super-progressive speech." and this THREAD, "Well DU has become quite the Obama bash fest...." and this Pitt THREAD, "Is this as bad as I think it is?" There's more where those came from, so if PJ wants to do a SOTU DUFU later,...

I keep a list of historical analogies — derived from years of grading papers — that tell me that the individual using them is (to be polite) more interested in rhetorical impact than historical accuracy. Before last night, the list began with “we need a Marshall Plan for X,” where X usually equals Africa or the Middle East, and ended with “the United States is a young country.” Both are fallacies: the Marshall Plan was a pump-priming program, not an effort to rebuild the infrastructure and remake the culture of half a continent; and while European settlement of North America...

Barack Obama's State of the Union address sure sounded good, didn't it? There were lots of solemn promises, lots of stuff about America's "bright future" and a line about how we are now facing this generation's "Sputnik moment" that will surely make headlines all over the globe. But we all knew that Barack Obama could give a good speech. That has never been the issue. What the American people really need are some very real answers to some very real problems. So were there any real answers in Barack Obama's State of the Union address? Well, Barack Obama promised that...

Picking a fight with his own party, President Obama on Tuesday called for ending earmark spending and proposed a five-year partial budget freeze in his first State of the Union address before a Congress packed with newly ascendant Republicans eager to cut even more deeply. In a broad 62-minute speech in which he called for rejuvenating America’s innovative spirit - what he called “our generation’s Sputnik moment” - Mr. Obama said the economy is beginning to bounce back, and said now is the time to push forward with a job-growing agenda. But even as he promised to rein in spending,...

The U.S. is facing a "Sputnik moment" in which it must embrace investments in research and education, President Obama will say at his State of the Union address Tuesday night. Obama, in excerpts of his speech released Tuesday evening, hearkened back to the Sputnik era, when the Russian satellite's 1957 launch set off the "space race" and a decade of intense technological development. "Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t...

National Journal has obtained a draft of the president's address from a Democratic insider who declined to be identified because the source would be violating the White House's embargo.  In the speech draft, Obama declared that the global economy poses new challenges for America. "The rules have changed," the president says.   Declaring "we do big things...That's how we win the future," Obama extolled bipartisanship, compromise and American exceptionalism while offering an agenda aimed at restoring the nation's economic competitiveness.  Among the proposals Obama offered was tax simplification, eliminating taxpayer subsidies for oil companies and extending wireless coverage to 98...

U.S. President Barack Obama is urging the nation to seek inspiration from the former communist empire the Soviet Union to guide America out of the current economic troubles.In a preview of a speech to given today in North Carolina, Obama will call for a "Sputnik moment" of government and private sector "investments" in research, education and infrastructure.Obama has faced accusations that he is a socialist, communist, fascist and anti-capitalist. Over the years he has repeatedly claimed that communist China as doing better than the Unted States. Now, with this explicit call to emulate the Soviet Union, Obama and his image...

Enlarge ImageBigger fleas have littler fleas. And Mimiviruses are infected with smaller Sputnik viruses.Credit: Courtesy of Bernard La Scola/URMIT Little more than protein capsules chock-full of genetic material, viruses barely rank among the living. Yet like people, at least one virus can catch a virus--the viral equivalent of coming down with the flu. This "flu" virus impairs the host virus's ability to grow and reproduce, a research team studying the largest known viruses reports. Viruses are tiny biological hijackers that cause diseases that include the common cold, the flu, chickenpox, and AIDS. They infect animals, plants, and microorganisms and...

Fifty years ago this month, President Eisenhower and Sputnik were in the news -- and so were the marital travails of an Air Force pilot named David Steeves. The 23-year-old lieutenant -- once a national hero -- was now under a cloud of innuendo and suspicion stirred up by the nation's news media. Decades before media abuse became a hotly debated topic, Lt. Steeves was a victim of it, suffering a public humiliation he did not deserve. The Air Force, for its part, may have contributed to this guilt-by-innuendo. But ultimately it was the mainstream media that put the pilot's...

Recall the embarrassment Hillary Clinton suffered when she tried to explain she'd been named after Sir Edmund Hillary after he'd climbed Mount Everest -- only to have it pointed out that she had been five years old at that time? Well, she still seems a little confused about her birth date. Here's an interesting passage in today's debate: Hillary: We've got to enlist the American people the way we did in a previous generation for the Apollo program. As a little girl, I remember being thrilled about that, and feeling there was something I could do. [Shrugs] My fifth-grade teacher...

MOSCOW - Just a month after the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first artificial satellite into orbit, it boasted a new victory — a much bigger satellite carrying a mongrel dog called Laika. The mission, 50 years ago Saturday, ended sadly for Laika but helped pave the way for human flight. As with other episodes of the Soviet space program, Laika's mission was hidden under a veil of secrecy, and only after the collapse of the Soviet Union could the participants tell the real story behind it. The satellite that carried Laika into orbit was built in...

WASHINGTON -- Should the world's most-used search engine be more of a Yankee Google Dandy? Google Inc. occasionally features light-hearted doodles on its colorful home-page logo to commemorate special occasions. But now they are drawing criticism from conservatives for not being more patriotic. The Mountain View, Calif., company bathes its logo in stars and stripes every Independence Day, but last week's decision to honor the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch -- the second "g" in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite -- is being blasted by some conservatives. Not only did Google honor an achievement...

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...

WASHINGTON (AP) - With a series of small beeps from a spiky globe 50 years ago Thursday, the world shrank and humanity's view of Earth and the cosmos expanded. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviets and circled the globe Oct. 4, 1957. The Space Age was born. And what followed were changes to everyday life that people now take for granted. What we see on television, how we communicate with each other, and how we pay for what we buy have all changed with the birth of satellites. Communications satellites helped bring wars and celebrations from...

Sergei Khrushchev is used to having a seat on the front row of history. Not only because his father, Nikita, was a premier of the Soviet Union, but also because he worked as an engineer at the forefront of Russia's space programme. As a young man, he was at his father's side on many of his official visits around the Soviet Union and abroad, including the historic visit to the US in 1959. On 4 October 1957, Sergei was in Kiev, Ukraine, where his father was visiting on military business. What started out as a routine engagement for the...

When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of...

Secrets of 1957 Sputnik launch revealed By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago   MOSCOW - When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one...

Russian space experts are wondering whether the United States used an anti-satellite weapon last month to kill a small Russian research satellite, the Novosti news agency reported Wednesday.

Today marks the 49th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age.On 4 October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite of Earth, beginning mankind's reach for the stars.

In... 1970, a Washington gossip columnist found herself seated at a dinner party next to rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. "One of the most fascinating men in the world has just moved to town," she gushed to her readers afterward. "The rocket genius is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely handsome and socially charming." It might seem odd to judge the mastermind of the Apollo program's Saturn V launch vehicle -- and, earlier, the German V-2 -- by his savoir faire. Yet Dr. von Braun's gift for talk and salesmanship, together with his technical skill and managerial prowess, were indispensable to his...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...