Epilogue

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky From a letter written in 1911

rom the perspective of 50 years since the event, there is little doubt that the quasi-political Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 injected the world into the Space Age as no purely scientific research program could have done. Without the U. S. national humiliation and the space race that followed, there would probably be no NASA today, no man would have set foot on the Moon, and we would not be using spacecraft as widely for research, Earth observations, and the wide array of other scientific and practical applications.

This point of view was expressed by Wernher von Braun in an April 1958 article he wrote for the Des Moines Sunday Register: “The Russian Communists may well have done themselves an ill turn by humbling us in the space race. Unwittingly, they made the sleeping American giant awaken.”1

A comment by Hugh Dryden, one of the early NASA deputy administrators, to Anatoly Blagonravov, his Soviet counterpart, at an International Astronautical Federation congress in Washington in 1961 succinctly expressed the same thought: “If we had [had] cooperation, neither of us would have a space program.”2

The new discoveries being made today with large and marvelously discriminating instruments such as those on the Hubble Space Telescope are truly remarkable. The exceedingly useful environment-observing instruments, the reconnaissance satellites, and the huge array of communications and position-locating satellites have taken us into a new world of observation, information gathering, and global connectedness.

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OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

The instruments of the 1950s were almost laughably simple by present standards. In the first Explorer, we put a single Geiger-Muller counter and a handful of transistors and other components together to produce a data stream of only a few digital bits per second from only a few hundred miles in near-Earth space. Today, that simple circuitry could be replaced by a few square millimeters of circuitry on a silicon chip. Its information could be carried in a small fraction of the bandwidth used by today’s space probes from billions of miles away.

But keep in mind that back then, we were on the very forefront of technological progress.

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by many key Industrial Age developments that presaged the entry into space. The century was opened by the first powered flight by the Wright brothers. Only a quarter century later, the first tests of liquid fueled rockets were being conducted. Rocketry made tremendous advances during World War II, culminating in Germany’s development of the V-2 rocket. Electronics moved from the invention of the first vacuum tube by DeForest to Marconi’s first transmissions across the Atlantic to the invention of the transistor. All those advances paved the way for entry into space in 1957.

The situation today in space parallels that with respect to aviation at mid-century. We were a nearly equal distance beyond the Wright brothers’ pioneering flight then as we are today beyond the first space launch. Fifty years after the first powered aircraft flight, there were thousands of aircraft in the air on any given day. Today, the world’s space-faring nations have successfully launched more than 4000 major objects into Earth orbit and beyond.

The initial foray into space in the middle of the twentieth century profoundly and enduringly influenced our daily lives, in much the same way that aeronautics influenced the first half of the century. Space has become an integral part of our culture. We all employ space technology every day, often without thinking about it— it has become an inextricably interwoven element of telephone, Internet, television, and military communications; weather observation, forecasting, and dissemination; other environmental monitoring and appraisal; land-use surveying; global position determination; and so on.

Space terminology has even entered our everyday terse speech. In the same way that people say “bring your transistor” when referring to a transistor radio, they now say “turn on the satellite” when referring to their satellite receivers.

The opening of the Space Age had a profound effect on our physics and engineer­ing educational curricula. Sputnik aroused an immediate general sense that science and engineering training in the United States needed a shot in the arm. Higher ed­ucational standards were quickly established, and introductory texts soon appeared