[Insert some kind of PSA about pyromania not being as much fun in real life.]
This here is a hobby of mine, and I do have other hobbies, mostly of the nerdy kind, and like most nerds of a certain calibre I was brought up to sneer at Dungeons & Dragons and prefer some more niche RPG ruleset; Baldur's Gate III, besides being a fun game, has been an eye opener in terms of the incredible piece of folk art that is Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means perfect, I am in awe at the sustained intellectual effort of millions of people over decades that turned the sprawling mess that was AD&D into a balanced and logical way of structuring play. Not the least of all of this was the balancing of the iconic "Fireball" spell.
Wizards of the Coast nerfed "Fireball," is what I'm saying.
And now we seem set on a course of discovering whether "real" fireballs have always been nerfed, by reality, as it gets more and more likely that someone will actually use them.
I'm not going to talk about H-bombs today, not even in the sense that Sputnik was launched into orbit by a very big rocket, which came out of efforts to build a fireball-casting ICBM. ICBMs are, from a certain point of view, not particularly ambitious rockets, since they don't aim to put things into orbit. The American Vanguard program did, and to a very ambitious apogee of 3,969km, at that. (Starlink satellites orbit at less than 600km, and the ISS at 420km.) As of June 1956, PROJECT VANGUARD aims at putting a Vanguard satellite into orbit in September of 1957, but the press is reporting the possibility of delays due to engine firing failures in test runs. In the event, the first successful Vanguard launch was six months late, whereas the Russian Sputnik launch occurred on schedule on 4 October 1957. The Sputnik program was well-publicised, and the target launch date was known, and met, and it is one of the greater distortions of Twentieth Century history that
"Privately, however, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and President Dwight D. Eisenhower were aware of progress being made by the Soviets on Sputnik from secret spy plane imagery.[2] [Wiki]
The point that easily gets missed here is that Vanguard was the designated American satellite and rocket, and it turned out to be mainly good at casting fireball at the launch facilities. Fire: Fickle servant, cruel master, etc.
We can talk about the sociological dimensions of the "Sputnik Scare," or whatever we want to call it, at length. I am, after all, the product of Sputnik schools, as indeed is our entire modern world. Sutnik isn't the actual origin of the endless STEM educational crisis --that goes back to WWII, or even WWI-- but it is the key moment in the timeline of our collective imginarium that substitutes for the technological history of the Twentieth Century. (The reality of draft-dodging Ostdeutsch turning a traditional medicinal plant into a snake oil anti-schizophrenia drug, and then leveraging that into an Irish generic pharmaceutical giant on the backs of quasi-anonymous-but-Nazi-curious investors is not one we want to hear.
On the other hand, Vanguard was such a complete and utter technological fiasco that had significant consequences for my life. So it deserves some muckraking, I decided.
