The Sound Heard Around the World
As an impressionable fourth grader at the height of the Cold War, the faint sound that was broadcast via Radio Moscow on October 4, 1957 might has well been the shot heard around the world:
Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.
Indeed, the sound from the radio transmitters aboard tiny Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, did herald enormous changes.
It shocked a complacent U.S. into a paranoia-tinged space race with the Soviet Union and humankind into a new era of science and technology that promised to be liberating but with the hindsight of 50 years has been, in my view, an enormously expensive and only qualified success because it turned the attention of world’s powers away from pressing needs here on Mother Earth.
John Noble Wilford, The New York Times‘ laureate science writer, takes a more sanguine – and wordier – view.
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4 Responses to “The Sound Heard Around the World”
Coincidentally, I was recently discussing Sputnik with my partner, an American historian who specializes in that era, and who pointed out something the authors of the Time’s article ignores…
Sputnik, and the fear that the Soviets may not only have a technological advantage but an intellectual one as well, led to a transformation in American education policy. Government invested massively in education at all levels, to ensure that a new generation of Americans could meet and surpass the Soviet challenge.
Shaun’s contention that the space race “turned the attention of world’s powers away from pressing needs here on Mother Earth” is a widely-held critique of the Apollo and NASA in general. In fact, scientists are often very critical of human space flight, and argue they could do things cheaper etc with robots.
The reality, however, is that there are always “pressing needs” here on earth. There were before the space program…there were when the program was gutted in the 70s…there were in the 80s and 90s and 00s.
The space program was about aspiration…reaching for something transcendent…something an counterculture figure like Shaun should appreciate more, I feel. There are always wars, and famines, and hurricanes…but for one moment in the 60s Americans looked up beyond themselves…and even today the global space station is a remarkable example of cooperation among otherwise squabbling nations.
A not so bad return on investment, I would argue.
MarloweC:
You are, on balance, correct that this has been a not so bad return on investment.
The ancillary benefits of the space program in medicine, engineering, earth sciences (!!!) and a host of other areas — not the least of which was education reform — should not be overlooked.
I grew up in the thrall of JFK’s man-on-the-moon goal and all things NASA and I do not for a moment diminish the space program’s achievements.
But along the way NASA went badly off track by putting most of its eggs into two programs — the space shuttle and international space station — that have not been good returns on investment.
Which is why I’m a big fan of manned exploration to Mars and other areas of the solar system. I feel its the pie in the sky goals like that that led to a huge bumper crop in the 60′s and 70′s of engineers and scientists that really solidified America as a global leader. We need that again. Technology has stagnated since that great push. Students want to be athletes not astronauts now.
There is a reason we had cloth winged byplanes in the 20′s, and 40 years later the SR-71 blackbird. And also why 40 years after that we still have the SR-71 as the benchmark for production aviation. Sure NASA has largely been spinning its wheels the last few decades, but thats no reason to sign off on the idea of space exploration forever. We need a goal to capture the imagination of the next generation, and a gov’t that can lead us there.
Paranoia? Sez who?
We’re Not There Yet [tm], universal cradle-to-grave entitlements, with income and wealth distribution for all (more accurate than “human needs”), are we?