When people talk about a moment being burned into memory, they usually mean it in a negative way: President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Princess Diana’s fatal car crash, 9/11. The launch of Sputnik 50 years ago this month was different. It certainly had its negative side: no one likes to wake up to find that your nuclear adversary has thrown a shiny ball over your head and that you can’t do a thing about it. But the dawn of the Space Age was also a hopeful event. Visionaries celebrated humanity’s long-awaited climb out of its cradle, and pragmatists soon savored the benefits of communications and weather satellites. Many of today’s scientists and engineers trace their life’s passions to that fast-moving dot in the night sky.

“In his millennia of looking at the stars, man has never faced so exciting a challenge as the year 1957 has suddenly thrust upon him,” astronomers Fred L. Whipple and J. Allen Hynek wrote in the December 1957 issue of Scientific American.

3 Comments

1. 1. CaneMan 09:17 PM 7/19/09

   It is the humble opinion of this family in Canada that the space program is not just here to improve all of out lives, which it has done extremely well. GPS, Moto-mechanics, you name it, the space program has invented something in our house holds. However with the limited budget of the space program we must first protect the earth from asteroids, space junk and the sun. NOW hold on. Before you beat us up. Having a defense system on the moon is not a small feat. With working on something of this magnitude it would need to encompass most of the earths leaders to come to an understanding on not just the size of the budget but on the cooperation of these nations to hold the keys to use it. This in itself would take years. However if we could get beyond the mass pride of some of these nations we could develop a system that would protect the earth from asteroids and other problems that arise from around our home. Now quite biting off things like men on Mars and Venus. These are important, but nothing is more important than the earths safety. On this I hope we can all agree.

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2. 2. trimonde 08:53 AM 4/22/11

   When I apply the principals of Green, or Environmentalist Ecology to Space exploration I can only think of the same way that I learned these ideals here for Earth. Observing and learning from nature itself. Thus, I believe we can guide our reasoning about what we aim for and spend on time and resources towards space exploration the same way.
   To it seems like we were flees jumping onto any animal that walks past their hosting dog, at the risk of meeting their death when a iguana carries them into a desert.
   Let's face it. We were made here, we evolved fitting perfectly each one of our living atoms to the precise combination of gases and gravity that constitutes our planet.
   I sure hope no one has a nervous breakdown at NASA when they finally figure out that we are moving nowhere any time soon, at least nowhere reachable in our present day living physical form.
   What should be spending our billions of Space dollars on then? The answer is simple. On things that will benefit the human spices here at home. And the best way to do it is to simply mimic the best we can the way celestial bodies do it.
   To me in makes more science to invest on telescopes for example. I can envision giving the planet a set of eyes, to reproduce perspective more accurately. two or three satellites orbiting the Sun that aim at observing the Universe. A stationary ring orbital global space station, with a high speed transit system to carry out all work that is made possible by zero gravity. Then open the door to space "tourism" not squander money shooting people up into the sky just to retrieve them again somewhere in the ocean. We should just dump all future energy production plans that pollute our planet or create impending danger one way or another and just focus on harvesting the Sun's energy out in Space. Visiting and robotically exploring our moons and planets is fine, we never know what may be out there that will help us here on Earth. But plan on landing people on Mars? Common people, we are not kids playing with rubber band glider launchers. We have people and children nearing the end of their lives (78.whatever years of age is a pretty fast running flickr of time in the Universe) ...not knowing if their illnesses will ever be cured that are in much more need of our sciences and resources, space isn't going anywhere. Let's think right, in the name of our children's future, their children's future...and the lives of the living.

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3. 3. trimonde in reply to CaneMan 08:56 AM 4/22/11

   here here! good point i forgot to mention. ...Sooner or later there will be a rock heading straight for us.

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