Sputnik Plus Fifty

If the launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial Earth satellite, did anything it opened people in 1957 to the possibilities that space travel presented. Some of those possibilities, such as of nuclear weapons carried by the same kind of rockets that could launch satellites into orbit, haunted the world with the prospect of annihilation for decades. But there were other possibilities, of a new age of space exploration that would win fortune and glory for nations that participated.

The first, horrible possibility thankfully never came to pass. The second seemed to become reality one magic night, just twelve years later. "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." For just a couple of hours, the world forgot the woes of war and civil unrest, and looked up with wonder.

If one were to suggest, either in 1957 or even in 1969, the year of Apollo 11, what the fiftieth year of the space age would look like, the answer would have likely been wide of the mark of what actually came to pass.

Plans confidently drawn up the year Apollo 11 happened suggested that people would explore Mars during the decade of the 1980s. Just the year before, a hit movie entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey painted a vision of huge, wheeled space stations, a town on the Moon, and nuclear powered space craft voyaging toward Jupiter. Film goers almost forty years ago were confident that they were seeing a glimpse of the future that would be.

The reality of 2007 is rather wide of the vision perceived of the early years of the space age. A tiny space station, a dysfunctional space shuttle, a space program stuck for decades in low Earth orbit all contribute to a sense of disappointment of promises yet unfulfilled.

The whys and wherefores of how the first fifty years of the space age turned out will doubtless be debated by historians for many years. Was it the dysfunctional politics of the early 1970s that soured people on space adventures? Or was the pace set by the first decade and a half of the space age just unsustainable? Or were people back at the beginning, when even the idea of space travel was a wonder, just too optimistic?