50 Years Ago, Launch of a New World

The United States tried to launch its own satellite, Vanguard, but as the nation watched on live television, the rocket rose just four feet and exploded. Johnson called it "one of the best publicized -- and most humiliating -- failures in our history."

Many Americans literally went to ground, building bomb shelters. "The public relations impact of Sputnik in October of '57 never faded away until the election of 1960," said William Ewald, who was one of Eisenhower's speechwriters. "Everyone's speeches -- 'The Russians are coming, they're 10 feet tall, they're 12 feet tall, they're ahead of us in outer space.' People were talking about the missile gap, which did not exist."

Today we know that the United States wasn't behind the Soviet Union technologically. One reason the Soviet Union had bigger rockets was that, unlike the United States, it didn't have the technology to miniaturize the nuclear weapons that intercontinental missiles would deliver.

A new book on Sputnik, "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, reports that the Soviets were desperately afraid that the United States would launch a preemptive nuclear attack. The satellite Sputnik was never as important as the R-7 rocket that delivered it -- and that served notice that the Soviets potentially could strike America with intercontinental missiles.

"Sputnik was never about space or the satellite. It was always about the missile, the rocket it rode on," Brzezinski said in an interview.

The Legacy of the Space Age

In 1957 many basic features of space were unknown. No one knew if Venus or Mars or any other planets in the solar system were habitable. Textbooks still taught that the shifting surface characteristics of Mars, observed through telescopes, might be the seasonal fluctuations of vegetation. Robotic probes eventually showed that they are caused by dust storms.

Half a century ago, no one could have predicted the boom-and-bust nature of human spaceflight. But now the Apollo triumph looks in retrospect like a heroic Cold War stunt. "Beating the Russians was everything. Going into space was almost secondary," said Hickam, author of the book "Rocket Boys," which was adapted for the movie "October Sky."

No human beings have gone beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. The international space station, a version of which was envisioned as long ago as the early 1950s, has yet to be completed.

There are bold plans at NASA for a return to the moon near the end of the next decade, about the time of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. But the space agency will have to achieve this feat on a tight budget, using spacecraft architecture that resembles that of Apollo. Much of the glory of post-Apollo spaceflight has belonged to unmanned probes and orbiting telescopes.

Perhaps satellites have been the real story of spaceflight all along.

"I thought eventually we'd have a few satellites in orbit, but not hundreds," said Konrad Dannenberg, 95, another of the German scientists on the von Braun team.

About 6,600 satellites of one kind or another have been launched since Sputnik, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He said 850 to 920 are in active operation, and of those, 568 are for communications.

Sergei Khrushchev, now a senior fellow at Brown University, cites the proliferation of satellites when he speaks of the historical significance of Sputnik Night:

"It is the beginning," he says, "of the new world."

On the 50th anniversary of the Space Age, few people use the term "Space Age" anymore. It's the Information Age now, and the era of globalization. Space technology has played a key role in the creation of a highly networked, accelerated, communications-saturated civilization.

People who have grown up in the age of satellites may find them no more remarkable than streetlights or storm sewers. They're infrastructure.

Sputnik plus the Internet equals Google Maps. Click on "Satellite," zoom in, and you can see your house from space.