Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite. I don’t remember it (because I wouldn’t be born for another decade), but the “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” heard ’round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents’ generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.
Space was part of the terrain of our imagination for as long as I can remember — after all, the sibling born right after me landed on Earth pretty much right before the Eagle landed on the moon, and my mom insisted on watching the moonwalk in the hospital. But it wasn’t like imagining that you were a tiger or a prehistoric human so much as imagining you were a firefighter or the President of the United States — being an astronaut was something that real humans had actually achieved.
At some point during my childhood, we came into possession of a huge stack of issues of Life magazine from the 1960s and ’70s. It was a while before I noticed that every single issue in the stack had something to do with the U.S. space program (and longer still before I realized that this was why those particular issues had been saved). The effect was that I saw rocket launches and the space race as a normal — and omnipresent — part of American life.
Of course, as we get older, we start re-examining things we took for granted as kids. I’m more aware now of the politics involved in setting our space priorities, and more willing to ask whether there are better ways to allocate scarce resources. Given my vivid memory of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger during my freshman year of college, I can’t help but ask the question of how we distribute the risks in pursuing our collective aspirations.
And somehow, as a kid, the whole U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. cold war dynamic of the space race zipped completely over my head. I don’t know if this was because the U.S. got to the moon first — maybe it’s easier to see a competition as friendly if you’ve won it. But there were other reasons to see the Russians as co-explorers in space, like the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. To some extent, the competitive aspects of the conquest of space may have served as a displacement of cold war struggles that might otherwise have involved actual battles. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere about the ways our scientific and technological curiosity can be good for us.
Sputnik’s effects are so thoroughgoing that it’s hard to tease them all out, let alone try to calculate whether on balance they are more good than bad.
Anxiety about Sputnik prompted serious attention to math and science education in American public schools, but this also reinforced the idea that educational priorities ought to be determined on the basis of external political or economic situations rather than on the basis of what kind of education would best serve our children and the ends they might wish to set for themselves.
Our planet is now orbited by many artificial satellites. Some of them spy on us, or serve to heighten tensions between governments trying to establish themselves as military forces to be reckoned with. Some of them shine light on the actions of regimes seeking to hold themselves apart from the rest of the world. A bunch of them transmit television, which, depending on who you ask, either has the potential to bring us all together or to isolate us more completely from real communion with our fellow humans.
It’s impossible to be objective about a trajectory that started before my birth, that continues to this day, and that exerts a subtle but inescapable gravitational pull on so many bits of our lives. In some ways, I think the important question is no so much what humans do with a particular piece of technology, but what they do with the fear and the wonder, the anxiety and the curiosity, that this technology and its use inspire in us.
Footnote on the Life collection: it was the doing of that famous Luddite, your Grampete. He refused during his 84 years to have anything to do with a computer (other than utilized data for the management decisions he made).
He was, however, fascinated with the human endeavor of creating space travel, and wanted to keep the lay man’s record of it — until inner space (and his wife) refused to allow the collection to move with him into their reduced quarters. Your parents scoffed it up, and you got to benefit from seeing history from a different perspective than textbooks, and build your own ideas of its meaning.
Where. Is. My. Moon. Base?
“And somehow, as a kid, the whole U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. cold war dynamic of the space race zipped completely over my head. I don’t know if this was because the U.S. got to the moon first — maybe it’s easier to see a competition as friendly if you’ve won it.”
The US certainly won the race to put a man on the moon but I cannot help but think the Soviets might have actually contributed more to the continued manned exploration of space. I base that on the fact it was the soviets who did the pioneering work in keeping men alive and well in space for prolonged periods of time. Certainly any planned mission to Mars would draw more on that than on the work done to put a man on the moon.
but I cannot help but think the Soviets might have actually contributed more to the continued manned exploration of space.
Hadn’t good old Nazis been the true pioneers? – With first suborbital flight and wonderful scientific experiments on limits of human endurance performed on lesser races of humans. Or do you know to distinguish between those two kinds of cannibal regimes – disgusting Nazi neo-cons, and wonderfuly humane homo soveticus?