This Thing is Fifty

A bright silver flying object changed our world fifty years ago this week. It was the size of a basketball and weighed ten pounds less than I do. Americans could see the small speck twice a day as it crossed the sky like a slow shooting star. Russians could brag about it constantly.


Sputnik was the first human-made satellite in space. It didn’t do much compared to today’s satellites but it scared the hell out of us because of what we thought it and its successors could do. Our morale was shaken too because we apparently lost the coin toss in the space race game and were now on the receiving end, defending our pride and global status. Over the next twelve years we took the ball and ran with it, to take this metaphor a bit further, and scored the ultimate game-winning moon landings.

Today there are nearly a thousand satellites orbiting the earth at any given time. Our lives depend on them in ways we may rarely realize. Weather forecasting, Tom Tom and Desperate Housewives enter our lives by way of satellites. Cell phones that teenage users, map photos clear enough to display license plate numbers, real-time troop tracking – all enabled by satellites.

We won the race to the moon but haven’t been back since 1972. Outer space exploration that once promised Mars colonies and lunar vacations is now limited to multi-national high tech constructions projects. The science that launched humans out of Earth’s gravitational pull continues to have positive influence on our ground-based lives but only connects to the final frontier in movies.

October 4th marks not only the birth of the space age but also the beginning of highly-visible acting careers for Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Billingsley, Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers.



Here are a few other things associated 1957:

- Celebrities Melanie Griffith, Matt Lauer, Paul Reiser and Geena Davis were born and Humphrey Bogart died.

- Liz Taylor’s 3rd marriage and I Love Lucy’s last episode.

- Buddy Holly and Tommy Dorsey shared space on the pop music charts and John Lennon met Paul McCartney.

- Dwight Eisenhower was president, gasoline costs 24 cents per gallon and you could buy a new Ford for $2000.

- My hometown New Orleans gets its 2nd and 3rd TV stations and the Governor of neighboring state Arkansas calls out the National Guard to prevent nine black children from entering a public school.

Boomers know first hand how much the world has changed in fifty years. But age doesn’t really matter. If you are reading this, your life has been influenced by a Friday night rocket launch in Russia on October 4, 1957. According to an article in the Washington Post this week, Sputnik led to the formation of a U.S. government agency that developed the computer network we now know as the internet.