Note: I'm going to keep this post at the top of the page all day, so you might want to scroll to see if I'm putting up other stuff.

Homer and I continue our week-long space policy debate over at the LA Times, this time with a discussion of the event that kicked off the space age, and its impact down the five decades since.

[Update at 8 AM EDT]

Jeff Foust is having a Sputnikpallooza over at The Space Review today. In particular, you should read his essay on the wonder and disappointment of the past half century, which reflects and expands on a lot of the themes that I've been debating with Homer Hickam all week.

[Update a few minutes later]

Did Sputnik create the Internet? Well, it's a stretch, but it was, at least indirectly, one of the pieces of the puzzle. Anyway, it has at least as good a claim as Al Gore...

[Update at quarter to nine]

Dwayne Day's prognostication about military space systems fifty years from now is worth a read--they will look a lot like todays. But he has one key caveat, that could make them quite wrong:

Weapons delivery from space has been possible for decades. What has changed is that it is now possible to precisely deliver conventional weapons onto an enemy. But the cost is prohibitive compared to other forms of weapon delivery such as cruise missiles or bombers, which have the benefit of reusability. Given the cost of putting something into orbit, the goal is to keep it there as long as possible rather than bring it down to hit something. That seems unlikely to change barring a radical decrease in launch costs.

Emphasis mine.

[9:15 Update]

Lileks has Sputnik beeps.

Alan K. Henderson is collecting Sputnik links today as well.

[10 AM update]

Alan Boyle has a roundup of space history links, and is collecting Sputnik memories in comments. People are welcome to leave some here as well, of course. As I noted to Homer (as does Alan) we were a little too young for it to leave an impression. And of course, for many of my readers, it's as far away an event for them as WW II was for me.

[Update at 10:25]

It's Sputnik, the movie!

Update at 4 PM EDT]

The satellite versus the supermarket. How did we really win the Cold War? I wonder if this LA Times editorial was influenced by the week's discussion between me and Homer?

[Update at 5 PM EDT]

Jim Oberg has further thoughts on Sputnik and the space age at fifty.

[Evening update]

My final thoughts for the anniversary on Sputnik, the past and the future, are up at TCSDaily.

[Update at 10 PM]

Tim Cavanaugh, at the LA Times, who masterminded my dust-up with Homer Hickam this week, has a piece on how space has been making us crazy for fifty years.

And our last dust-up edition is up, in which I talk about transhumans in space.

Unless we end up with Directed Energy weapons in orbit. Then we may have to view the paradigm from a different direction.

Another good read between you and Homer. His example of the air mail service as a sample of government that worked kinda overlooked the idea that it wasn't run at all like NASA. If that service had been run like NASA, one government agency would have tasked another to build and fly the aircraft, instead of what did happen where the government provided a guaranteed cargo or flight rate.

The closest thing we have to something that went well in space commercialization is the ComSat effort (started by JFK, by the way!), leading to most of the space communications we have today. That would have been a better example on his part.

I'd pin the internet and digital logic directly on Claude Shannon, we would be almost half a century behind where we are today if it weren't for his 1937 and 1949 papers. It's a pity he was such a recluse, he should have taken Einstein's place as Time's man of the century.

Rand,

In your very nice TCS commentary you say "history doesn't allow do overs" but by golly, we are getting a bad one via Griffin's Folly, Apollo Redux, Apollo 2.0 or in the man's own words "Apollo on steroids." Dystopian indeed.

Gary C Hudson

Rand,

In your very nice TCS commentary you say "history doesn't allow do overs" but by golly, we are getting a bad one via Griffin's Folly, Apollo Redux, Apollo 2.0 or in the man's own words "Apollo on steroids." Dystopian indeed.

Gary C Hudson

one of the calumies about the exploration vision is that it is not "sustainable." I suspect that the passage of the Mikulski-Hutchison amendment by unanimous consent in the Senate has started to put that one in its grave.

I see that revisionism is the order of the day. You can't take Sputnik out of the context of a world dominated by a nuclear armed, genocidal totalitarian social order which in the 10 years since the second world war had expanded to include about a third of all humanity. When an entity like that launches a satellite which is the precursor for thermonuclear tipped missiles, it's pretty scary. When their leader tells you that "we shall bury you", it's a time for critical self examination.

Today, the monday morning quarterbacks paint the event as petty xenophobia and paranoia, more interested in teaching a moral than presenting historical truth.

one of the calumies about the exploration vision is that it is not "sustainable." I suspect that the passage of the Mikulski-Hutchison amendment by unanimous consent in the Senate has started to put that one in its grave.

More action is required than a small dab of money. The key problem with your statement is that we have decades long history of counterexamples. For example, NASA has been funded with hundreds of billions of dollars over roughly fifty years. If this had been a private investment, it'd probably be generating a few Bill Gates worth of new wealth each year. While spin offs probably cover some of the gap and the scientific output is nice if rather low value, I don't see the existing NASA work and historical output remotely near in economic value what has been put into NASA.

Further, NASA funding has indicated that even in the absence of a useful space program, you can acquire stable public funding. But keep in mind all those projects that have been discontinued over the years. My take is that currently NASA funding is directed by its politically powerful supply chain. Development and construction of a NASA project is high margin. So there is a lot of support for doing so. For some things like Space Shuttles, a low rate of activity is high margin as well. But the cycle of building a project and then dropping it, ie, unsustainability, will continue as long as the point of NASA funding continues to be enriching the supply chain rather than growing space-based economic activity.

Mark, you have yet to say why the current bout of exploration will turn out differently. What happens when the lunar station gets built or that flag gets planted on Mars? My take is that the high margin business will play out and NASA will move on, directed by Congress and the special interests, to the next gold rush project.

The only way this will change is if someone makes more money using the NASA infrastructure than they would make if the project is discontinued (or infrastructure discarded) and a new one started.

Here's my take. US government spending on space is probably somewhere around 0.2-0.4% of US GDP. But the US budget is roughly 20% of US GDP. My take is if you really want to increase the amount of money that the US spends on space, you increase space-based GDP rather than try to increase the portion of Earth-side GDP that is spent on space. Federal spending will follow tax revenue.

Have any letters/comments been sent in by readers about the LA Times series?

When an entity like that launches a satellite which is the precursor for thermonuclear tipped missiles, it's pretty scary.

Not to anyone who understood the real situation (as opposed to hyping it for political purposes, like Kennedy). The "missile gap" was actually in our favor, and the people who were working on real rocketships knew that launching satellites on missiles was a dead end. As Tom Wolfe said in The Right Stuff, "These boys sense panic in your program, and that's something they don't respond to."

Today, the monday morning quarterbacks paint the event as petty xenophobia and paranoia, more interested in teaching a moral than presenting historical truth.

"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it."

Your "historical truth" overlooks a few facts. Apollo could not stop Russian ICBMs; a few astronauts walking around the Moon and picking up rocks had zero military value. Far from standing up to the Russians in space, Kennedy and Johnson unilaterally disarmed, cancelling all of the military spaceflight programs (X-15B, DynaSoar, etc.) along with antiballistic missile programs.

Much as the current administration ignores military spaceplane development for another round of Apollo stunts.

The closest thing we have to something that went well in space commercialization is the ComSat effort (started by JFK, by the way!), leading to most of the space communications we have today.

Er, no. The first communications satellite was developed by AT&T, not John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy created Comsat because he didn't want private enterprise in space. Most of the space communications we have today didn't come about until the 1980's, when private companies managed to find ways around the Comsat monopoly.