My October looks very busy at the moment so while we are here on the verge of the 50th anniversary of that historical event, let’s quickly review for the young folks what happened, or what seemed to happen, when Sputnik, the first ever earth satellite, built in Russia, began to orbit the Earth every 96 minutes on October 4th 1957. It had a skin of polished aluminium and was visible from Earth.
It weighed 184 pounds and was emitting beeps on two frequencies that ham radios could pick up, a smart piece of propaganda ensuring publicity from all around the world, at a time when secrecy was a major weapon in military hierarchies in America. At the right time of day you could see it with binoculars as it went through the sky at 18,000 miles an hour, an unheard of speed. I did, and so did all my students at the time.
The Russians helpfully gave out its trajectory and times of visibility, not forgetting to mention specifically that it could also be seen from Little Rock, Arkansas where America at that time was being treated on TV to the sight of a little black girl being escorted into a high school with a guard of soldiers to protect her from the freedom loving segregationists. The recent Jena Six incident and the Katrina affair shows how far we have come in that regard.
America had agreed to the proposal to create an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year, and was working on the Vanguard, which weighed a few pounds. Eisenhower wanted to keep the military out of the picture so the military missile rockets were not to be used to put Vanguard into space. He, correctly as it turned out, was suspicious of the Pentagon. He didn’t want to see a militarization of space. Every stage of the non-military work was made public except some of the problems.
The Russians said nothing whatever about what they were doing. Russian scientists could read everything the West had available about rockets, but none of the Western scientists bothered to read anything in Russian. Few of them indeed knew any Russian. Even wanting to learn it could cause suspicions in that anti-communist era of hysteria. I remember one Russian scientist saying, “It’s better to say nothing and then do something, than talk all the time and do nothing.” He was a dreaded communist. Now we are hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to a communist nation. How times change.
One of the German rocket scientists over here actually warned the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in late September 1957, that the Russians were about to put a satellite into space. He was told that the Russians didn’t have the capability. A week later it launched.
Towards the end of WW II in England, I and my friends had experienced the power of the German V2 rockets. Lots of them landed around and about. I had the experience of flying a long distance after one landed quite a way away. As I was going through the air, and thoroughly enjoying it, I must add, I could hear the rush of the rocket coming down. They came down faster than the speed of sound, and their sounds followed them down. There was no defense possible against them.
Both Americans and Russians had taken everything about the German V2 rockets that they could lay their hands on as the War came to an end. And the Americans had managed to get Von Braun the major German rocket scientist, a 117 other top scientists, and a few hundred V2 rockets and whole trainloads of spare parts. So it came as a stunning blow to American prestige when Sputnik, which weighed 184 pounds was there in space and visible in American skies. To get a payload of that weight into space was not even considered possible by the Americans. It was a stunning technological achievement of rocketry brute force, and only a few disagreed with that, mainly some sour grapes American military people.
Scientists all over realized, or said that October 4th was the day on which we entered the Space Age. As I have said in previous posts, I was a member of the British Interplanetary Society in those days. It was a group of physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians who believed that the next frontier for humanity was space. Of course it was considered weird by ‘orthodox ‘ scientists. Six months before Sputnik went up the Astronomer Royal, an orthodox scientist for sure, said flatly “Space travel is bilge.”
People like Arthur Clarke the science fiction writer, had been certain all along that eventually it would happen. But Americans were chagrined to find that they were not the first or the best, a matter of great importance to the American media and politicians. So complacent were the U.S. authorities that America would be first in space that Sputnik had passed over America twice without being detected before the authorities heard about it from the London Associated Press report. Great security.
There was tremendous fallout from the incident. The dog Laika orbited the Earth a month after in Sputnik II, which weighed over half a ton. The main focus in the Western press was that the dog could not be brought back alive, not the fact that it was alive for a long time in a 1000 pound plus vehicle in outer space, providing valuable data for the next step, a human in space. Many Americans, who never for a moment thought about why the Moon didn’t fall into the Earth, debated fearfully about the possibility of the Sputniks falling out of the sky and annihilating cities.
Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961, a young man in his twenties, and then Valentina Tereskova, the first woman in space, managed a manually steered rendevous of her spacecraft with that of a previously launched cosmonaut. When they returned to Earth they were married. The no longer weird British Interplanetary Society invited her to London to a banquet and presentation in her honor. One of the high moments of my life in England was meeting this representative of what women could do when given the chance.
It became politically imperative from a PR point of view that Americans beat the Russians at something obviously scientific or at least technical, which means the same thing to many Americans. A young and charismatic President chose getting to the Moon. And money and expertise were poured into the project, which eventually succeeded. I remember sayng to my group of nerdy friends, “I hope to God they don’t put up an American flag on the Moon to continue this stupid Cold War game.”
Hindsight is 20/20 as we all know. It is clear now that the satellites were not the point of the exercise at all. Nor was space travel. It was a heads up to the American military complex. The Russians were perfectly aware of the total ruthlessness of the American military. They knew that the American fire bombing of Dresden, which killed 100,000 people in one night, right in front of the advancing Russian army, was an unavoidably obvious muscle flexing exercise to show the Russian military what we could do, and would do.
The nuclear destruction of another 100,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the Russians declared war on Japan, and during peace negotiations with the Japanese, was just another heads up to the Russian military. The Russians lived in dread of a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the hysterically anti-communist Americans. The 1000 pound payload of Sputnik II showed the Americans that the Russians now had intercontinental ballistic missile capability, and that Russia was no longer a helpless target. An attack would produce an attack.
Outwardly the whole affair was a PR disaster for the American public, who had always been taught that they were first in everything, and that communists were envious of their prosperity and freedom. Things weren’t made better when the Vanguard program was accelerated too fast under political pressure, and the whole world was invited to watch the wonders of American expertise in instrumental miniaturization in science as it was launched on live TV.
The rocket lifted maybe four or five feet off the ground and exploded in front of everybody in the world. The amazing ability of American scientists to miniaturize instruments was lost in the politically induced fiasco.
Politicians of course used fear to make political capital out of the whole affair. Lyndon Johnson who was then the Senate Majority Leader warned the now hysterical American people and his scientifically ignorant colleagues, that the Russians could now build space stations and emulate a favorite teen age pastime of dropping rockets on cars going by on the underpass, except that it would be bombs not rocks. Of course the tactic worked. Fear always works in this country if the voice of the messenger is grave or authoritative or perpetually quoted. Another Senator intoned what has since become a common catch phrase, “What is at stake is nothing less than our survival.”
But at the time, the obvious conclusion made by the media in many countries was not that the Russians could now hit back, but that the science and mathematics education system of the Soviets was superior to those of the capitalists, as it was. And it finally dawned on Americans and Britons that they were ignoring half the human race, when it was discovered that half of the thousands of Russian qualified engineers were women. The jet pilot Valentina Tereskova also had a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. And she wasn’t unusual in that regard. Engineering and science at the highest levels were totally acceptable career paths for girls in Russia.
American engineering at the time was male dominated and seemed to be focused on trivia like the tail fins of cars. One American rocket scientist, Julian Davidson remembers that he was watching TV when the news about Sputnik came and realized that he was watching a commercial about the ingenuity of American science at having developed a new razor for Gillette.
And finally America began to consider raising the educational standard of its students, a matter always previously considered dangerous by its politicians, as it is today. The political spin is always high-toned but the political actions always seem to make it harder for the less than very rich to get an education for their children.
Well, we all woke up for a short time, and pushed ahead with the same modern science that the Russian students were learning. That’s one reason I’m here today. When Sputnik I and II went up and our deplorable (British) condition in mathematics was made obvious, many new programs were set up for the learning of the mathematics discovered since the 17th century invention of the calculus, which was as far as many science students went. I was asked by Wolsey Hall of Oxford, a premier home study college for degree students, to write three large courses in Modern Mathematics. One was for the students who, within a year were going to find such material in their university entrance exams. Another was for the teachers who had never been exposed to the powerful modern methods, and a third was for parents who would be wondering why junior was learning an algebra in which a x b didn’t always give the same answer as b x a.
These courses were advertised in the Times Educational Supplement and used all over. It was because of this published work and a 10,000 student experience as a teacher that I was offered a post as Senior Editor in an American Text Book Publishers. That’s how I came to be here. Sputnik is a personal matter for me therefore, as is science and mathematics education.
Hindsight as I said before is 20/20. We didn’t enter the Space Age with Sputnik and its competitors. We still haven’t got the international space station fully operational and Sputnik went up 50 years ago. What we have got though are lots of satellites. There are over 6,500 satellites now revolving around the planet, most of them inoperative space debris. Just over 900 are working, and over 500 of those are for communications. Many of course are spy satellites.
So now we have the Information Age instead of the Space Age. NASA’s budget is probably too small now to have manned programs beyond the Moon, or even a permanent space station ON the Moon.
But one consequence of Sputnik you are using now. The Pentagon put its scientists to work to create a computer network that could still function if some of the centers were bombed by the now possible Russian missiles. It was called the Arpanet then. Now it’s called the Internet. You can have the pleasure of seeing a Google photo from outer space of your car in your driveway. Probably makes you feel as safe as it makes me feel.
But the Information Age has not yet arrived for a significant, financially and politically powerful section of the American people. We woke up as a nation educationally for a short time, but now we have been going backwards again because of Christian religious fundamentalism.
People are advocating using the Bible as a science text. Such stupidity does not merit debate, no matter how clever the arguments and deceptions being used. The same fundamentalists regard women as inferior to men, advocate original sin, are paranoid about sex, and consider humans as separate from Nature and appointed master of the planet Earth by some supernatural authority. They are the enemy of planetary and human survival.
Let those of us who value humanity and truth stop backing away every time they wave the Bible at us. There’s no chance of a humane emphasis arising from these people, or a regard for the planet as anything but a resource to mine for raw materials. We can see where that is leading us. Completely verified scientific data is now denied and ignored, unless it fits into a current anti survival political and religious dogma.
In my health articles I have often said, “If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?” The same thing applies to the planet. Too much cleverness, too much absurd and counter survival dogma, and too little wisdom. No thought for future generations, only the next election for the politicians, and quick profits for the already multi-millionaire CEO’s.
As I said in my post of July 4th 2006, about woman and the goddess, it doesn’t work, and hasn’t ever worked. Women automatically think of future generations. It’s time to access their wisdom, even if they have black skins and needed military protection just to go to school in this country, while in others they were encouraged to reach their full potential. As the old proverb goes: “Cherish your enemy, and contemplate him. He holds the secrets of your success.”
Our bigoted, ignorant and implacable enemy is a hydra with many heads, patriarchy, paternalism, cronyism at every level, corruption in government, money as God, competition without cooperation, might is right and the profit motive as the only motives for action. Not to mention a disgusting habit of assuming moral superiority over others, while many of them in high places are actually practicing the ways they call immoral or have made illegal in others.
And let’s also remember religiously inspired and deliberately cultivated ignorance. The policy of the Catholic hierarchy for centuries in Europe and today towards the most uneducated sections of the human family in Latin America, is a case in point. Learning critical thinking was a no-no.
Contemplating these matters will show the way out of our dilemma, by making us acutely aware of the enemy. I suggest first finding ways of tapping the wisdom of the disregarded half of the human race as a good start. Vive les femmes sages! Vive Tereskova the unavoidable example.
