To boldly stay home

To boldly stay home
Sputnik’s scary launch became the Mission to Planet Earth

Updated: 10/04/07 6:58 AM

It was no more than the size of a pumpkin and the only intelligence information it relayed was the beep, beep, beep of its own startling existence. While many Americans looked up in terror — which was the point — Sputnik, the Soviet satellite launched 50 years ago today, had no cameras for looking down at Earth.

Today, much to the benefit of all humanity, the view is reversed. Some 900 satellites look down on us, while another 5,000 or more have gone dark, fallen to Earth or slipped the bonds of terrestrial gravity for voyages into the cosmos. But most earthlings today don’t find them worth craning our necks for, and we hold no more interest in them than we do in the occasional pronouncements of how we should again fly human beings to the moon, or Mars.

All the fear and resolve that propelled the Space Race up through the moon landings from 1969 through 1972 have given way to a world in which people are less fearful of the military uses of rocketry than they are reliant on the satellites that bring us the inestimable benefits of weather forecasts, environmental data and global communications.

When films such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” come into our homes over the many movie channels now available, they are bounced off a satellite that is not, as was predicted in the wake of Sputnik, in the neighborhood of space stations run by Hilton or shuttles operated by Pan Am.

The fear at the time, of course, was that the Soviet designers who could launch Sputnik could just as easily have hurled an atomic bomb into orbit, or onto our heads. That remains a risk, perhaps. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, space has become less a garrison than a switchboard. Even the military focus is on communications and data collection — sometimes better known as spying.

Despite the initial belittling it received from some American officials — “a useless hunk of iron,” the defense secretary called it — others quickly came to see it as a great threat to national security. A sort of technological Pearl Harbor, according to atomic scientist Edward Teller.

The results, if unplanned, were mostly to the good. The United States ramped up its support for public education and, on the way to inventing moon rockets and spy satellites, created weather satellites, communications satellites, fuel cells, microcircuits and a useful little toy called the Internet.

Rather than racing off into space, we send up new generations of Sputniks to help us better understand and thrive on our home world. The Mission to Planet Earth, it’s called. And we are all the better for it.