President Kennedy speaks to Congress on May 25, 1961. Photo Credit: NASA
The recent 40th anniversary of the first humans landing on the moon had a nice air of nostalgia about it. The moon landing anniversary coverage packages from the news media (take that, Social Media!) endlessly ran the obligatory reference that Apollo 11 was a make-good to President Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to Congress and the nation – “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
Kennedy’s seminal challenge wasn’t the first time that the space race helped the United States define long range goals and marshal its national resources. The 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite which was sent into orbit by the former Soviet Union, caught the U.S. almost entirely by surprise, and actually created a mini public and military crisis (and some degree of panic).
The former U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik in 1957, creating wide-spread panic in the U.S. It only sent radio beeps.
Sputnik, coupled with the catastrophic failures of the USA’s Project Vanguard rocket launch attempts, sent shock waves across the US. Sputnik served as an incredible wake-up call to America, most notably as the direct catalyst for the creation of two still-standing scientific and technical government entities – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
By the end of 1957, the U.S. was really successful in the space race - creating some of the most spectacular launch pad explosions ever witnessed. Click on this to see rocket go boom.
But, on the public side, falling behind the Russians in space placed enormous emphasis on a critical issue in late 1957 America – that the U.S. had better place renewed emphasis on education as a whole, and specifically on math and science.
Well, it worked. For a while. The baby boomers of the ’50s and ’60s were now forced to go beyond biology and algebra and actually take calculus and physics in high school.
Who's a geek now?
These boomers were the same people who would later go on to fuel our information and communications revolution in the ’70s and ’80s: the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak of Apple), Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Oracle’s Larry Ellison. The list goes on and on. And the Internet as we know it, well that started as a DARPA research project to make our communications networks redundant in the hopes of the U.S. surviving a nuke attack. Most of us would be vaporized, but at least you could still get that email from Nigeria about your inheritance.
In 2009, it seems like the U.S., and the industrialized world, for that matter, continues to ignore our wake up calls. Was 9/11 not a wake up call that perhaps the bisection between intelligence and technology had grown so wide that preventable tragedies were not prevented? Are greenhouse gasses, global warming and so-called climate change not alarming enough that we continue to make the planet uninhabitable and sustainable for future generations?
Welcome to Beijing.
How could the events leading to the current self-induced global financial and economic turmoil be so ignored, even by governments and other regulators?
The vernacular saying for a long time was “well, if they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they….(solve some sort of problem)”. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard someone use that.
No snarky caption; I just really miss Robert Goulet. Now go out and do something to help save the planet.
And now, more than ever, do we need to break ourselves of the habit of using the snooze bar when it’s time to wake up and accomplish something. - Rich Teplitsky -
