The Beep-Beep-Beep Heard Round the World

Most of the time I’m not very serious—nor so long-winded, but in this posting I want to write about the most world-altering event of a lifetime. It occurred the fall of my senior year.

On October 4, 1957, the eve of my taking SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), the high-stakes college admission exam, the startling news broke: the Soviet Union fired off a rocket in Kazakhstan powerful enough to launch the first satellite into orbit. Sputnik I was a 184-pound shiny metal basketball that emitted beep-beep-beeps for 3 months as it circled the earth every 90 minutes. Little did we test-takers realize that in the aftermath this space shot our lives would change dramatically.

Initially, it was just an oddity when the night sky was clear. Sputnik I could be seen—or so we thought. Actually, it was the spent booster rocket’s second stage that we were watching. And the next month (November 1957), Sputnik II followed--with the first living creature in space, that poor dog Laika on board, who died from the heat within a week

I only vaguely remember Sputnik being mentioned by the carload of us high school seniors making the long drive from the North Hills to the campus of Carnegie Tech (now Mellon) where the 3-hour, multiple-choice College Boards were administered.

Sample questions from analogy section: Cat is to dog as oak is to:

a. acorn
b. beech
c. rosebush
d. none of the above

Since we were sleep-deprived after cramming vocabulary words and hitting the road so early, this phenomenal event hadn’t quite sunk in. The Cold War was at its height in the 1950s, and here was the US’s fearsome enemy, the USSR, leading us into the space race. Weren’t we invulnerable, and weren’t they backward, repressive, and technologically inferior? We seniors couldn’t quite believe it had happened, nor could we envision the huge changes in math and science education that lay just over the horizon. Some of us would change our college plans, choosing aeronautical over civil engineering or astrophysics over biochemistry. Younger siblings still at North Allegheny High would now be urged to excel in harder advanced science and math courses in Sputnik’s wake.

To mark the 50^th anniversary, the Air Force Space Command website [click on underlined name to link to it] provided a succinct explanation about why Sputnik beat Explorer, the first US satellite, and what has been the long-term significance of the launch—if you’re interested in more detail.

Actually, Sputnik didn’t change my trajectory. I managed to do well enough on SAT to get admitted to Allegheny College up in Meadville and become (sigh) an English major. Nearly 10 years later, I had my only brush with outer space. Since publishing was my field, I was a part-time editorial assistant, when my daughters were small, with the Astrophysical Journal, which had an office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Since SAO was headquarters for the world’s satellite tracking network, I had the privilege of buying my coffee outside at the same Mr. Snack truck with one of the most eminent scientific brain trusts of the 1970s.

Fast Forward 50 Years

But here we are in 2008 and the Sputnik spurt has splashed down, according to a recent Associate Press story:

The aerospace and defense sector is bracing for a potential brain drain over the next decade as a generation of Cold War scientists and engineers hits retirement age and not enough qualified young Americans seek to take their place. The problem: almost 60% of U.S. aerospace workers in 2007 are 45 or older….

Not only did our generation (and the next) answer the call to put the US into space and onto the moon, but in the flight they provided the whole world with electronic marvels that still amaze. The impetus came in February 1958 when the US Department of Defense established its greatest success (in my opinion): ARPA (the Advanced Research Project Agency), responsible for funding the development of new technology for use by the military. In the 1960s, huge amounts of funding flowed from federal agencies to universities allowing basic science researchers to be creative. What did they produce? Computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, lasers, faxes, GPS, WiFi, etc. And the most wonderful technology of all (originally called Arpanet), which allows grandmas like me to publish our thoughts and fire them off to anyone in the world of cyberspace willing to read our blogs--the Internet superhighway leading to the World Wide Web!

How ironic. Because of the technological success of our generation, US universities are awarding 2-1/2 times more engineering, math, and now computer science degrees than they did 40 years ago. But the best and brightest young scientific graduates are taking jobs with Google, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and Verizon. They sure aren't going into teaching math and science. So philanthropists like Bill Gates are sinking some of their largesse into improving high school science and math programs. Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor and producer of sophisticated hardware, is sending it employees into elementary schools as volunteer tutors. What goes around comes around.

Of course, today the kinds of degrees and career paths graduates are following have mushroomed, which reminds me of the nuclear cloud that was the specter on that 1958 horizon of ours. I’m not sure there is any propellant in 2008 as powerful as that was.

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I intend to blog on a weekly basis about My Senior Moments from the 1950s with the hope of jogging some memories. Please! Chime in with your thoughts by clicking below on “Comments.” Did Sputnik change your plans? Do you have computer fixation, too?