Sputnik's 50th Anniversary

October 4th is the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, the little Soviet spaceball that sparked a revolution. Reprinted below is a nice email from Ken Harbit that aptly describes Sputnik's impact on us all:

"Fifty years ago tomorrow (October 4 1957) the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (as it was called then) put a 184 pound ball in orbit around the earth. They called it “Sputnik.” I remember my Dad was upset after reading about it in the newspaper. When I asked him about it he said the Soviets made a statement and ended it with the world’s biggest period.

Overnight the “Rat Race” turned into the “Space Race” and the “Computer Age” began. We got a lot of stuff from the aftermath of Sputnik. Freeze-dried food, electric shavers, transistors, the integrated circuit, and Internet.

The computers that guided Friendship 7, the mercury capsule that put Alan Shepard into space in 1961 had 32k of memory and would fill the ground floor of Joyner Library. The computers that guided Apollo 11 to the moon were comparable to two Commodore 64s and would fill most of the ground floor of the library.

On July 16 1969 we effectively ended the “Space Race” with the world’s biggest exclamation mark when Neil Armstrong said “That’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind” as he stepped on to the moon.

Today we have computers small enough to be injected under the skin, cell phones millions of times more powerful than the computers that guided man to the moon … and beyond, we have “virtual” stores, libraries, virtual trips into space and to the deepest parts of the oceans.

It's strange to think that it all started with a 184 pound silver colored ball that orbited Earth every 98 minutes sending temperature and pressure readings back to Earth."

CrackedPot's father was a quality control engineer with NASA for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960's and in particular he worked on the Saturn V rocket. He later worked on the Space Shuttle in the 1970's-1980's. CrackedPot can remember him flying off to Cape Canaveral (which was called Cape Kennedy back then) or to Houston for the rocket launches. He would return from these "business trips" with a patch just like the ones the astronauts wore on their spacesuits. To commemorate the successful Apollo 11 mission, he also brought back a tiny lunar landing module necklace. Sadly all these mementos were lost in a burglary and subsequent fire.