My Sputnik Childhood
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.
—–
*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.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Reflections
3 Responses
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Saturday, 6 October 2007 at 00.48
Permalink
Terrific post, especially owing to your personal involvement.
I well remember when Sputnik went up and America's self-image went down. Post WWII America had a confident, upbeat sense of being on top of everything, which for the most part it was. The Soviet Union was seen as both a dangerous threat and a bumbling bogeyman.
Schizoid notions and ironies didn't end there, though.
I think most people were so relieved to have the war past them and so confident of being able to handle any threat that they largely passed off news that the Soviets had the A-bomb and then, in no time, the H-bomb. Both developments were cause for nitty gritty concern, much more than the launching of Sputnik. But hey, the Russians had stolen secrets and copied our technology. It wasn't as if they had actually come up with these terrible weapons on their own.
And, mitigating the potential threat was the fact that the Soviet bombers were just capable of making it over the pole to within the U.S., and little more than that. Soviet fighters couldn't come with them. Also, the Soviets neglected to perfect a big, reliable air-to-air refueling capability, which was a major mistake. So, the prospect of suicide missions to take out the Upper Michigan Peninsula suffered a certain lack of appeal on their side and credibility on ours.
The Soviet Navy had yet to build up to what it became in the late 1960s. And while the Soviets had seen to it they got plenty of V-2's, rocket technicians and crib notes from Germany after the war, along with whole production plants, they didn't seem to have any big rocket-delivery capability.
That is, they didn't seem to until Sputnik. I think it wasn't just that little beeping blob in near space itself that Americans found unsettling so much. What got to us was the realization our Cold War adversary had nuclear weapons AND the ability to do clever things with rockets that could put something right over our country, out of reach of the Air Defense Command and everything else. Blitzes and mushroom clouds were things that happened — that were only supposed to happen — to countries across the seas, not to America.
Suddenly, American youths enjoying Mr. Wizard on TV but scoring below German, Japanese, Paraguayan and Hottentot high school students in math and science was perceived as an embarrassment. Worse, it was seen as a national security liability.
Blue ribbon panels were formed to study the problem. Editorials were written to bemoan it all and call for big changes.Teachers were ordered to do something. Money was appropriated for more and better education.
Out on the real world, most American teens approached the whole thing in their own inimitable way, tinkering with radios, hi fi's and building hot rods. Most never were that much for pure science and mathematics. They were tinkerers and first-class technological hands-on innovators.
If you've ever closely inspected and listened to the rumble of a meticulously built-up flathead Ford V-8 or been in the presence of a dragster powered by a 24-cylinder Allison V-24 charging down the quarter mile — a visceral experience — you know they were damned good at it, too.
Another irony. You know what Russian youths, who escaped their drab existence in academies devoted to advanced math and physics, envied? It wasn't U.S. bombers, fighters and aircraft carriers. It was rock 'n' roll and hot rods.
Fortunatley, we've always had a relatively small contingent of exceptionally brilliant math and physics types (take a bow, Jeff). After a shaky start, they not only got us into space but all the way to the moon and back, settling decisively any one upmanship advantage the Soviets had gained with Sputnik.
on Tuesday, 9 October 2007 at 08.33
Permalink
Excellent post.
It seems that we could not/would not repeat the moon mission today. Our safety requirements today are much higher, our cost structure is higher. We seem to have moved away from this kind of risk taking.
We have moved down the road towards more high tech, but it has not lent itself to more manned moon missions. Maybe it is because we did it, and did not find enough reasons to go back.
The trend now seems to be for unmanned space exploration.
on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 at 00.29
Permalink
Jeff wrote:
I saw a program three or four years ago covering this concern, although in a slightly different context. What I took away from it is that we have plenty of scientific and engineering talent, including fresh talent, albeit we graduate far fewer of each annually than Russia and China. But much of the talent we have is engaged in defense-related industries and in working on things produced abroad. Maybe that makes it seem as though we're more short handed than is really the case.