It was 60 years ago this week, on Oct. 4, 1957, to be exact, that the former USSR put a beeping, half-ton object into orbit. Sputnik 1, named after the Russian term for “fellow traveler,” was the world’s first artificial satellite. It scared the whole world, but none more than the U.S.:
Bloviating politicians and head-scratching scientists were soon talking of a “missile gap,” and the U.S. did something unprecedented and unrepeated: It greatly increased spending on science education. Improved course materials for high schools were developed, and within a year a new agency to promote space development was set up: NASA. It had money to pay for students seeking advanced degrees in the relevant science …
The nation sank money into science like never before and the space-race was on! Well, we didn’t get moon colonies or O’Neil habs, not yet anyway, but we got the rapid improvement in processor miniaturization, and quantum leaps in the global communications and computer technology that followed, on which the modern Information Age is founded. We even got to the moon.
Russia is still up to its technological tricks, this time in a different battle-space under very different leadership. But sadly, at some point, we started losing our way in the U.S.
Pseudo-science, quackery, and political expediency have embedded themselves into the national scientific discourse. Right-wing universities were funded, former defense scientists turned corporate shill defending everything from tobacco companies to fossil fuel producers, and think-tanks that “think” about ways to trick people into dismissing science rose to impede public understanding of the most basic, least controversial observed facts. And here we are.