So if the Soviets said, in the summer of 1955, that they were going to launch an Earth satellite in September of 1957 as part of their contribution to the International Geophysical Year, and their progress was fairly public, and they actually proceeded to launch said satellite, where exactly is the "Sputnik surprise?" One way to answer this question is that the button for enabling Google's contextual links feature has moved down to the text box, and that I accidentally clicked it, and it added the links in the first line, and, really, their sheer inanity says it all.
Another is to post this clip of Tom Lehrer making fun of
well, everybody, really. America, maybe. This is an extremely well known clip because just about everybody is embarrassed by the fact that a Nazi war criminal ended up in a prominent role in NASA. And then there's the ICBM and Huntsville, Alabama connections. Let's just not talk about it, m'kay? And then of course it is his rocket that is the only one available to put a satellite in orbit in the fall of 1957, or, as it happens, the winter of 1958, because the Navy's Vanguard program had ended up even further behind, somehow.
The upshot here is that the United States had three separate space/intercontinental programs ongoing in 1957/8, that all three of them were behind, and, as per the topic of this week's appendix, the Air Force's rocket was, to coin a Fifties-style neologism, a ballissile, specifically the SM-65 Atlas.
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| The now-closed Dounreay fast breeder reactor in Caithness, Scotland |
Anyway, the experience of postblogging technology is always weird because it's the most direct and easiest way to encounter that classic historian's disconnect between the popular history that solidifies around an event, and the actual events. Guys! There was no Sputnik surprise! Everyone knew that the Americans and Soviets were going to launch satellites during the (eighteen month) International Geophysical Year and that the Soviets were talking about an earlier launch date than the Americans. I don't think I've come close to unpacking why it was said to be a surprise, but we've got two years to go on that one.
"Power too cheap to meter" is a quote from Lewis Strauss, speaking in 1954 to the National Association of Science Writers. Strauss has not been well treated by history, and I am not here to be contrarian, but he went on to offer water as an example of something that progress had made "too cheap to meter," and from that perspective it's at least a plausible bit of prediction. Had he chosen to talk about about long-distance telephony, he would come across a regular prophet! For that matter, he turns out to have been a lot more wrong about predicting extended lifespans. Unmetered power turns out to be further away than ever, but at least there's a road to this outcome. The Wiki goes on to explain that the "statement was contentious from the start . . ." pointing out that, even in 1954, the AEC was not boundlessly optimistic about the future costs of nuclear power, and that one researcher found "dozens of statements" to that effect. Strauss' son seems to have hijacked the conversation by proposing that Strauss was talking about fusion power, something that we've seen as problematic at the Geneva Atomics for Peace conference, where Strauss comes out with a more typical blunder, trying to keep American fusion research secret for no particular reason. But, of course, "power to cheap to meter" comes out of Geneva very directly in a way that has nothing to do with either conventional atomic power or fusion: Breeder reactors.
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| Smaller than Sputnik, but solid state. NASA. No spying, pinkie swear! |
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| Source: https://www.original-political-cartoon.com/cartoon-gallery/buy/caption-displayed/385/ |
Historians' views of the Eisenhower Administration have . . . evolved. Better known as a late-era Modesty Blaise-relief cartoonist, Neville Colvin, a newly-arrived refugee from the "stifling atmosphere of Fifties New Zealand," captures the contemporary view of Eisenhower for Fleet Street. Uninterested, or even lazy, but with a lashing of malice barely under control. This is a thoroughly worthless First Executive. While the Britain, having given the world a senile dotard and a meth-head in succession, is not the country to point fingers, there's a sense that the United States has lost eight years. In contrast, writing in 1986, Robert J. MacMahon reviewed a decade of "Eisenhower revisionism" as being most successful in overturning "the traditional interpretation of an inept, bewildered President overwhelmed by his formidable secretary of state." Although "it can be fairly said that the majority of case studies have not sustained Eisenhower revisionism," because the revisionists "have elevated process over policy," we can at least agreed that foreign policy, at least, was "orderly and rational." I'm a bit surprised that MacMahon never gets into the President's health, but, anyway, about that---
Satellites.
