Editorial: The space race

Monday, Oct. 1, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

On Thursday it will have been 50 years since Sputnik launched the human race into the space race and forever altered how science and technology affect our daily lives.

When the Soviet Union thrust its 184-pound aluminum satellite into the Earth's orbit, a new, suddenly attainable, frontier emerged, adding an uneasy dimension to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. By being first in space, the Soviets demonstrated a technological, and potentially military, edge.

The United States was thrust into a game of catch-up that would capture the attention of its government and citizenry until the Apollo 11 mission carried Neil Armstrong to the surface of the moon in 1969.

Americans had plunged into the Space Age.

Less than 100 years earlier they had been crossing the Great Plains in covered wagons and had hailed the construction of the nation's first transcontinental railway. After Sputnik, space was our new frontier. People stood in their back yards at night, straining to hear Sputnik's beep or to see its light moving across the sky.

Architecture, toys, clothing styles and movies reflected Americans' new fixation on outer space. So did U.S. children's studies. The federal government, believing the Soviet Union could not be allowed to win this race, called for increased emphasis on math and science.

Our vocabulary, expectations and perspective changed. We would one day see that our planet was little more than a big blue marble in a sea of infinite darkness - a finite orb on which we were born, lived, worked and died.

Our society would embark on a quest for technological advances that would bring first Space Food Sticks and Mylar balloons and then computers and cell phones into our daily lives. Our nation would explore our solar system's farthest reaches and, eventually, send U.S. astronauts to live in space with those from Russia.

Because of Sputnik, the human race has journeyed into the great expanses of space just as it crossed more terrestrial frontiers - with the anticipation, hope and wonder that come with seeking to touch the unknown.