My Sputnik Childhood

Posted by jns on October 4, 2007

I nearly let pass this notable milestone: 50 years ago today the Soviet Union^* launched the first artificial Earth-satellite, called Sputnik. It was a tiny thing — suitable I suppose to being the first baby of the birth of the space age — just 24 inches across and weighing only 184 pounds. It was made of shiny polished aluminum, so that it reflected sunlight and was easy to see from Earth. It carried two radio transmitters that emitted continuous signals that didn’t say anything, not that they had to. The message was obvious.

Launching a satellite, in principle, is a simple thing. Point it in the right direction, accelerate it to a speed of something like 11 km/s (or about 7&miles/s)^# and it goes into orbit around the Earth. In practice this is not so easy. It takes a lot of rocket fuel to accelerate even 184 pounds to a speed near 7 miles/second, and that fuel takes more fuel to accelerate it, and that fuel takes more fuel to accelerate it, and so on.^& After you figure all that out, you end up with a very tall, multi-stage rocket that is very impressive when it takes off, even for the smallest payloads.^**

Then there’s all that goes into getting all the stuff to the launch-pad so it can take off. There’s a remarkable amount of engineering, mission planning, fabrication, transportation, and organization that goes into one of these events, and they only got bigger as the missions got more sophisticated. A modern space-shuttle launch comes at the end of years of planning and months of preparing the payloads; the launch itself involves hundreds of people at locations scattered around the world.

And it all started with that tiny little Sputnik. I was not quite two years old at the time, so I don’t remember its happening. I didn’t have any memorable artificial-satellite experiences until I went outside one night to see a transit of an Echo communications satellite some years later.

It surely affected my life, though. Sputnik was so alarming to the powers in Washington — perhaps to the average American, too — that we, the entire country, suddenly developed a keen, new interest in science and engineering, and in science, engineering, and mathematics education, and I was undoubtedly a product of that. When people today wring their hands about a shortage of scientists and engineers — which hasn’t been true for decades — I imagine it’s an echo from that time.

People looking to justify our commitment to sending a man to the moon thought of all sorts of alleged “spin-offs” from the space program, and proclaimed the marvels of Tang, Teflon, and Velcro, none of which were invented by NASA, nor invented for NASA. Computer systems and microelectronics got some boost, but the average computer user today would be shocked to see the primitive computer hardware that got Neil Armstrong to the moon.

One of the things that was touted as an accomplishment of NASA, a spin-off of the moon program, was project management. I think that may be a real contribution. My experience from doing a couple of space-shuttle missions is that the planning process is not fast nor particularly efficient, but it accomplishes its goals with deliberation and thoroughness. That care and deliberation has suffered some in recent years, perhaps a result of political and management hubris that believed we must know how to cut corners by now.

As a product of the Sputnik age, I take the growth of modern technology and America’s leading role in developing it rather for granted, but it’s far from established that we shall always be the leader. I believe that our remarkable achievements from the 80s and 90s in developing the personal computer, for instance, resulted from the investment our country made in science and technology education in the 60s, coupled with national interest, motivation, and pride.

Those emotions and commitments take nurturing; they musn’t be taken for granted or they whither. I fear that that’s been happening in recent years, and that our complacency will catch up with us if we do nothing about it. The renewal won’t be fast, because it takes new generations to grow into it, although current generations can do the plowing and fertilizing.

That’s part of the reason that I started Ars Hermeneutica, Limited in 2004, and that’s the big motivation behind our vision of a scientifically literate America.

I didn’t set out to write this as a justification or a motivational piece or an advertisement — or even as a fund-raising appeal^## — but I guess these all have one thing in common: that I care deeply about them.
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^*Which, one notes in passing, no longer exists. Things change, and even countries don’t last on forever.

^#The speeds are near the escape velocity from Earth, which is a bit more speed than is needed to establish an orbit, but it gives an idea of the speeds involved.

^&It’s not an infinite sum — the sequence does converge, and it has an exponential form, for roughly the same reason that the equation for compound interest has an exponential form. If you want details, Google “rocket equation”.

^**Note, however, that there are big differences in actual acceleration depending on the payload and the rocket chosen to launch it. Those of us accustomed to the Saturn V rockets launching an Apollo mission, or the rockets for shuttle launches, imagine a stately launch in which the heavy payloads seem like they’re never going to move, then they finally stroll off into the wild blue yonder. With that in mind, seeing once the launch of a sounding rocket, which doesn’t even attain orbit, was a surprise: it jumped off its launch-pad like a startled rabbit.

^## Although, it bears repeating that Ars Hermeneutica is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation, and contributions are tax deductible. Click to see how to Support Ars Hermeneutica.