http://www.carolpurroy.com
I’ve just published my memoirs – THAT’S LIFE; Many Mini-Memoirs. And it’s getting great reviews. But it’s limited, so I’ll add to it in bits and pieces, opinions and thoughts from my meandering mind here in my blog. Here’s the first:
JUST A SATELLITE
A young (i.e., under 50) friend of mine said, “I was looking up in the night sky and saw something moving. ‘Oh, oh, it’s a UFO!” I cried out, “Look! It’s a UFO!
She continued, her disappointment obvious., “But it was just a satellite.”
I was flabbergasted. I reminded her that it wasn’t all that long ago that the only moving things in the night sky, aside from the moon, were “falling stars” – upon which children made a wish, certain something so rare would guarantee its coming true – and comets, which some feared would bring the end of the world.
In December 1990, I lay in a hot spring in rural New Mexico one winter night, where the stars were so bright and seemed as if I could reach up and touch them. Then I noticed one moving, slowly, gracefully across the sky.
“Oh my god! Look! A satellite!” As my friend Judith and I simmered in the hot spring’s pool, we followed its path across the sky. It was exquisite. We were enthralled.
When my young friend said, “… it was just a satellite,” I recalled the day – October 4, 1957 – when the U.S.S.R. shot the first satellite into the sky, causing the U.S. to frantically reassess our own space program – and our educational system. We had to swing into high gear and do some catching up.
From Wikipoedia:
The American response to Sputnik bordered almost on panic. The Chicago Daily News declared that if the Soviets “… could deliver a 184-pound ‘moon’ into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out into space, the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the earth’s surface.
Newsweek predicted that several dozen Sputniks equipped with nuclear bombs could “spew their lethal fallout over the U.S. and Europe.”
Senator Lyndon Johnson envisioned a day when the Soviets would be “ … dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”
Senator Mike Mansfield ominously announced, “What is at stake is nothing less than our survival.”
… The United States’ official response to Sputnik was multi-pronged. School curriculums with an emphasis on science and mathematics were quickly established to prepare students for the challenges ahead; the National Defense Education Act was enacted, … support was expanded for the National Science Foundation, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created.
… The shock of Sputnik was also largely responsible for the establishment of NASA in 1958 to conduct the United States’ civilian space efforts.
The United States and the Soviet Union began a duel for control of the heavens, the so-called Space Race “… that consumed both nations for the next 11 years, ending only when American astronauts first set foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969.”
Just a satellite?
Like so many of our present-day technological marvels, earth-orbiting satellites are seen by our youth as so “ho-hum” they’re not worth a second look. My young friend apparently had no idea that the precursor of that satellite which she mistook for a UFO had rocked our world, knocking it out of its staid, complacent orbit for awhile.
Although there is now an abundance of satellites orbiting the earth, I still get a thrill when I see one arcing across the night sky.
Satellite orbiting the earth
