WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago this week, America was shaken outof technological complacency by a beeping 180-pound aluminum ballorbiting overhead. Sputnik was a shock because we had always assumedthat Russia was nothing but a big, lumbering and all-brawn bear. Hecould wear down the Nazis and produce mountains of steel but hadnone of our savvy or sophistication. Then one day we wake up, and hebeats us into space, placing overhead the first satellite to orbitthe Earth since God placed the moon where it could give us lovelysailing tides.
At the time, all thoughts were about the Soviets overwhelming ustechnologically. But the panic turned out to be unwarranted. Sputnikwas not subtle science. The Soviets were making up for theirinability to miniaturize nuclear warheads -- something that doesrequire sophistication -- by developing massive rockets. And theyhad managed to develop one just massive enough to hurl a ball intoEarth's orbit.
We had no idea how lucky we were with Sputnik. The subsequentpanic turned out to be an enormous boon. The fear of falling behindthe communists induced the federal government to pour a river ofmoney into science and math education. The result was a generationof scientists who gave us not only Apollo and the moon, but thesinews of the information age -- for example, ARPA that createdARPANET that became the Internet -- that has assured Americantechnological dominance to this day.
There was another lucky outcome of Sputnik. Two years earlier,President Dwight D. Eisenhower had proposed "Open Skies" under whichthe United States and Russia would permit spy-plane overflights soeach would know the other's military capabilities. The idea was toreduce mutual uncertainty and strengthen deterrence. Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev rejected the idea out of hand.
The advent of the orbiting satellite circumvented the objection.By 1960, we had launched our first working spy satellite. But ourgreatest luck was the fact that the Soviets got to space first.Sputnik orbiting over the United States -- and Eisenhower neverprotesting a violation of U.S. sovereignty -- established foreverthe principle that orbital space is not national territory but is asfree and open as the high seas. Had we beaten the Russians intoorbit -- and we were only a few months behind -- Khrushchev mightvery well have protested our presence over sovereign Sovietterritory and reserved the right to one day (the technology wasstill years away) shoot us down.
Sputnik and the Space Age it launched had one other curious,wholly unexpected effect. Before Sputnik, while still dreaming aboutouter space in science fiction, we always assumed that one stepwould create the hunger for the next -- ever outward from Earth'sorbit to the moon to Mars and beyond.
Not so. It took only 12 years to go from Sputnik to the moon, onwhich we jumped about for a brief interlude and then, amazingly,abandoned.
There are technological, budgetary and political reasons toexplain this. But the most profound is psychological. It's cold outthere. "In the Shadow of the Moon" is a magnificent new documentaryof the remembrances of some of those very few human beings who haveactually gone to the moon. They talk, as you'd expect, about thewonder and beauty and grandeur of the place. But some also recallthe coldness of that desolation. One astronaut tells how on themoon's surface he was seized with the realization that he and hiscrewmate were utterly alone on an entire world.
On Earth, you can be wandering a forbidding desert but alwayswith the hope that there might be something human over the horizon.On the moon there is nothing but dust and rock, forever. And then --just about all the astronauts talk about this -- you look up and seethis beautiful blue marble, warm and fragile, hanging in the blacklunar sky. And you long for home.
The astronauts brought back that image in the famous photo"Earthrise" -- and, with it, that feeling of longing. That iconicimage did not just help spur the environmental movement. Withsurpassing irony, it created at the very dawn of the Space Age alonging not for space, but for home.
This is perhaps to be expected for a 200,000-year-old race ofbeings leaving its crib for the first time. We will, however,outgrow that fear. It was 115 years from Columbus to the Jamestowncolony. It will take about that same span of time for a newgeneration -- ours is too bound to Earth -- to go out and not lookback.
Charles Krauthammer's e-mail address isletters@charleskrauthammer.com.
Washington Post Writers Group
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