50 years ago today the space age was born from the launch of a small shiny satellite--Sputnik. This two foot diameter, 183 pound, polished aluminum sphere catapulted the United States and the Soviet Union into a space race that climaxed with the first human to step on the moon and which has led us to where we are now with cell phones, personal computers, flat-screen TVs, robots on mars, and a working space station. All of this from a beeping metal ball.
What I find more interesting, though, is what Sputnik tell us about ourselves as a country. Sputnik was literally a slap to the face of the United States, a gauntlet thrown down in front of us by a country that we thought was incapable of the type of technology that was necessary to launch something like Sputnik into orbit. Heck, we couldn't do it, how could they?
Throughout our history as a country, the US really shines when it has someone to compete against. During the Revolutionary War it was the British, during the Texas Revolution it was the Mexicans, and during World War II it was the Axis. We don't do so well if the enemy is less well defined (Korean War, Vietnam War, today's war in Iraq.) It seems that we need a real, definably adversary to compete against, for our country to rally against, be it economically, technologically, or militarily.
We have lost our way in a manner of speaking. We have no defined adversary, only faceless terrorists and faceless corporations. Competition is being bred out of us. Our children no longer compete on the playground. Being better then everyone else is frowned upon. We all want to be equal and uniform.
Like in the science fiction stories of the 60's where we manufactured alien threats, we need a rallying point that we can use to bring back our competitiveness and our need to compete. Like a recent article stated:
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