COME THURSDAY, the Space Age will be half a century old. On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union announced the launch of Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite.
The sight of the bright, twinkling light arcing across the night sky and the sound of the steady beeping of Sputnik’s radio threw the United States into a crisis of confidence. Gone was the assurance that America led the world in science. The loss of that assurance meant the end of a sense of national security that had begun to take root in spite of the continuing Cold War.
The Space Age began with a race. In spite of their public statements, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union did not send rockets — unmanned and later manned — into space as a matter of scientific curiosity. The motives driving the race were a complex mix of national and political pride, international posturing and military practicality — the winner would also be the nation most capable of using rockets to throw nuclear warheads across the world to hit the loser.
The race began with preliminary heats. The Soviet Union won the first heat with Sputnik. There followed a number of others — largest satellite, most complex satellite, first animal in orbit, first human being in orbit, most human orbits, most humans in orbit — and the lead seesawed back and forth. But the ultimate race was soon agreed upon by a sort of planetary consensus — the first nation to place astronauts or cosmonauts on the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth would be the winner.
In 1969, when Apollo XI landed on the moon and returned — 12 years after Sputnik — the race was over. The United States had won.
Some would argue that the end of the Space Race was also the end of the Space Age, at least as far as human flight was concerned. Exploration has continued — sometimes very successfully — with unmanned spacecraft and planetary landers. But human space flight has been confined to low Earth orbit for more than 30 years. The United States has not launched a new manned spacecraft design for more than 20 years.
The U.S. government has said it intends to send a manned ship to Mars, perhaps within 30 years, but there is no firm financial commitment to the program. Sending a crew to Mars by 2037 would almost certainly require 30 years of uninterrupted national prosperity and unprecedented political stability. Neither of those is likely to happen.
But people are likely to reach Mars someday — because they can. The urgency of the Space Race is over, but the curiosity — which was always there, outside the halls of power — remains.
And there is much to learn.
The manned space program has become routine and faded into the background, but the robots that have been sent into space have discovered wonderful things. The Hubble telescope has extended humanity’s vision back toward the beginning of the universe. The Mars Rovers have stubbornly kept rolling and reporting even though they have passed 12 times their expected life span.
If it seems that progress stopped in space exploration after the moon landings, consider the vast gulf between Sputnik — a hollow silver basketball with a rudimentary radio transmitter — and the Mars Rovers, which roam the surface of a planet millions of miles from Earth, making their own power and doing experiments and, like every good E.T., phoning home.
For decades to come, the robots will remain the only true space dwellers.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor
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