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.
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The evolution of the space program continues to be dramatic. In a decade or so, it will be hardly recognizable. The shuttle, which for all its faults is the most sophisticated flying machine ever built, will be a thing of the past. NASA is moving to the Constellation system, which is basically a high-tech dusting off of the Apollo rockets and capsules. Whereas the shuttle is an ambitious spacecraft with modest goals (providing regular delivery-van service to orbit), Constellation is a modest spacecraft with ambitious goals: building a moon base, visiting an asteroid and eventually establishing human settlements on Mars. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is steering a slow but steady course that he argues can be sustained on a limited budget—an approach that many commentators wish his predecessors had pursued 30 years ago.
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