Sputnik: A vivid memory of a new dawn

Soviet satellite opened eyes, and Space Age

By Richard Rothschild | a copy editor on the Chicago Tribune sports desk
October 7, 2007

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.

Something had to be done -- and quickly.

Indeed, the U.S. joined the space race a few months later with the successful launch of an Explorer I satellite. But it took time to catch the Soviets. The USSR put the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961, followed by the spectacular 17-orbit flight of Gherman Titov later that year. In 1965 cosmonaut Alexi Leonov became the first person to walk in space.

Yes, there was tension and more than a few doubts about matching the Soviets. But there also was excitement and growing national pride as the U.S. rushed to close the space gap.

My grammar school in suburban New York rarely permitted students to watch television during class, but on May 5, 1961, about 60 of us crowded into Miss Little's classroom to see Alan Shepard become the first American to go into space.

The cheers from us 10- and 11-year-olds were loud and heartfelt as Shepard's slender Redstone rocket slowly climbed from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Spaceflight was no longer the stuff of Buck Rogers or Disney's Tomorrowland. Tomorrow was today.

A year later, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, I listened to part of his three-orbit flight on a radio at a neighborhood barbershop.

In May 1963, when Gordon Cooper flew 22 orbits, I thought it was pretty cool that as I went to bed, an American was flying up there in outer space.

When the U.S. next returned to space in March 1965, with the first of 10 two-man Gemini missions, the world the astronauts were leaving behind was changing -- and not for the better.

President John Kennedy, whose vision had challenged the U.S. to think realistically about landing on the moon, had been assassinated. So had Malcolm X, an eloquent voice for an emerging black consciousness.

The Vietnam War was escalating, and that summer the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in riots. When the Apollo program, the crown jewel of American spaceflight, kicked off in October 1968, the nation's confidence meter was pointing near zero.

Lost to assassins' bullets were Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Lost to fires and looting were whole sections of Detroit and Newark, N.J. And lost to the Vietnam War were thousands of American lives, heading toward a death toll that ultimately would top 58,000.

In an unfortunate twist, the soaring Apollo missions, which included six lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, took place during a down time in American history.

There was too much going wrong on the ground for much of the U.S. public to truly appreciate the achievements on the moon. When President Richard Nixon, who saw little political value in continued lunar voyages, canceled funding for three more Apollo missions, few complained.

Those wide-eyed days of the late 1950s and early 1960s were long gone. The times were no longer -- in astronauts' lingo -- A-OK.

Can a nation, a world that has grown so cynical at the start of the 21st Century rediscover a sense of awe and discovery with the planned return to the moon in the next decade? Or with the ultimate -- sending humans to Mars?

The incredible photos of Saturn and its moons sent back daily from the Cassini mission and the spectacular views from the Martian surface relayed by the Mars rovers show that space exploration still can inspire wonder.

Or perhaps another area of science or technology will bring the entire planet across a new threshold. It would be reassuring to know that the next time the future knocks, there will be a 2nd-grade class eager to open the door, and that we as a nation will embrace it as we did a half-century ago.

Happy Birthday to Hermione! She'll be 28 today and perhaps pregnant with Hugo if my calculations are correct. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_mrgreen.gif)

I think I remember JKR stating at some point that the cut off date was 9/1.