Much hoopla was made of the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik a couple months ago.

I haven’t seen anyone mention that a half century ago today, the first Vanguard mission, the American response to Sputnik, was a spectacular (and televised) failure on the launch pad, which simply heightened the concern we had about the Soviets being ahead of us in space (“Our rockets always blow up”). I wonder if history might have been much, or any different had it succeeded?