60 YEARS OF HUMANITY IN SPACE

SPUTNIK BEGINS EARTH'S QUEST INTO ‘THE FINAL FRONTIER’

“The only way of discovering
the limits of the possible is
to venture a little way past
them into the impossible.”

- Clarke’s Second Law

Imagine living in the United
States in 1957, a decade into the
Cold War. Eisenhower begins
his second presidential term.
Denying the right to vote ina
federal election is now illegal.
The Korean War ended four
years ago. There are no home
computers or cell phones. John
Wayne, Rock Hudson, and Elvis
Presley are the dominant stars
in entertainment. Elsewhere
on the globe, Japan’s economy
is finally recovering after
surrendering at the end
of World War Il. Germany,
split in half after losing that
war, is four years away from
building the Berlin Wall.

And on October 4, the
Soviets launch Sputnik.

America freaks.

The Space Race is on.

The Russians would seize a
clear head start, launching
Earth’s first artificial satellite
(Sputnik 1), first biological

life form (Laika the dog), and
first human (cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin) into space. Among
global tensions between
Western democracy and the
communist Eastern Bloc, and
worries about a nuclear arms
race against its rival nation,
the US would establish NASA
and regain the lead in 1969 with
Apollo 11: The first mission

to successfully land a human
being on another celestial body.

While the old Iron Curtain
has long rusted away and the
term “Soviet” barely induces an
emotional reaction anymore,
our world is in a new “space
race” of sorts today. But
rather than being dominated
by two national antagonists,
space exploration is pursued
and represented by more

BY CLIVE RAMROOP

than 70 government agencies
from most continents on the
globe, as well as some private
companies—often in civil
interaction with each other.

“One small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.”
- Neil Armstrong

Entering the Space Age, the
Russians’ rapid progress in
their pioneering space efforts
forced the United States to
play catch-up. Ironically, the
means to combat its Cold War
enemy came from a technology
captured from a past “hot
war” opponent. In late World
War Il, 13 years before the
Sputnik mission, German
scientist Wernher Von Braun
had invented the V-2 rocket, the
first ballistic missile capable of
carrying a military warhead on
a trans-atmospheric trip from
launch site to target. When
Germany surrendered, Von
Braun defected to the United
States and brought his research
with him to his new home. In
replacing the warheads with
capsules to accommodate
astronauts, the tool invented to
destroy a world civilization was
now repurposed to elevate it.

As Neil Armstrong prepared
for his trip to the Moon,
imaginations speculated
on what could be next for
humanity in space. Scenes
in the movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey [1968] predicted that
space tourism in the future
would be as commonplace as
airline travel, if the evolution
of space flight stayed on its
then-current trend. When a
mechanical failure on Apollo
13 put its astronauts’ lives at
stake— “Houston, we've had a
problem’ —Congress aborted
that optimistic vision, cutting
NASA's budget and forcing the
cancellation of the remainder of
the Apollo missions after Apollo

17 in 1972. Still, some notable
achievements did come to pass,
such as the US Space Shuttle
(the first reusable spacecraft),
Russia’s Soyuz rockets, and the
International Space Station—
the latter being a five-nation
joint project among the US,
Russia, Europe, Japan, and
Canada: A startling contrast
to the hostile dualism of the
20th century superpowers.

In recent years, Mars has
been chosen as humanity's
next landing goal, a notion
enhanced in the public eye by
the movie The Martian (2014)
and the novel on which the
film was based, and National
Geographic Channel's mini-
series Mars (2016). With the
Red Planet already being
explored by robotic probes like
Curiosity, non-governmental
organizations are plotting
manned missions of their
own. SpaceX aims to land
passengers and establish a
colony on Mars in the 2020s,
while Mars One is eyeing
its own permanent Martian
colony a decade Later.

“Twinkle, twinkle,
little star...”

Of course, space is so
immeasurably vast that
exploring this realm shouldn't
be limited to the Moon and
Mars. But the conditions of
deep space and many of its
worlds are so inhospitable to
life that human astronauts
wouldn’t survive a visit in
person, if they didn’t die during
the interminably long voyage
first. Not to worry; if a living
creature can’t be sent into a
harsh environment, go with
a well-built tool instead.

Immediately after Sputnik,
the Americans and the
Russians both scrambled
to dispatch more satellites,
eventually creating probes