We've looked at every space launch since, and scouted the key missions ahead. But the satellite that started it all is worth a glance back: One groundbreaking Russian robot has made everyday life on earth smarter and faster -- and it ain't finished yet.
Earlier this summer, a crane in Tulsa, Okla., hauled up a rusted 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that had been buried 50 years earlier in a bombproof bunker as a time capsule. The contents included a case of beer, 14 bobby pins, $2.43, a bottle of tranquilizers and 10 gallons of gas -- in case internal combustion engines had become obsolete by 2007.
Despite our best research efforts, we're still relying on internal combustion engines, but much in our lives has changed dramatically since 1957. Some of those everyday changes can be traced back to the launch, 50 years ago, of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The launch was a coup for the Soviet Union, and kick-started a new period of scientific innovation in the United States that culminated in the Apollo missions. Even though we haven't returned to the moon since 1972, plans are being hatched to go back -- and go beyond (NASA now says it will send Russian technology to find water on Mars and the lunar surface). Sputnik's impact continues to pervade life in the stars and back home, even as the little silver ball that could hits the half-century mark.
1. Weather You wouldn't want to bet your life on the accuracy of a weather forecast, but we're a lot better than we were in the pre-Sputnik age. The first weather satellite, Tiros I, was launched less than three years after Sputnik -- and quickly found a previously undetected tropical cyclone off the coast of Australia. Equipped with two television cameras, two video recorders and a crude communications system to send images back to Earth, Tiros I snapped 23,000 pictures during its 78-day mission, giving meteorologists their first overhead look at the cloud patterns that characterize storms. A global network of weather satellites came a year later.
Weather prediction has become commonplace on the 6 o'clock news, but now scientists want to use satellites to turn it on its face. Atmospheric researcher Ross Hoffman has proposed using infrared beams from satellites to warm the air around hurricanes as a method to change their direction. Sure, it's a long shot -- but so was Sputnik.
2. Communications The next major satellite milestone occurred in 1962 with the launch of Telstar I, the first "active" communications satellite that could amplify and retransmit incoming signals. Telstar ushered in an age predicted by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ) back in 1945, when he wrote that satellites "could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet." The first live transatlantic images were shots of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, broadcast from Andover, Maine, to a receiving station in France.
How important is the network of communications satellites that orbits above us now? When the Galaxy IV satellite malfunctioned in 1998, about 30 million pagers went silent, ATM and credit card payments were disrupted, and some television stations simply stopped broadcasting because of a lack of available programming.
3. Google Earth Surveillance satellites have been around since the U.S. Midas (Missile Defense and Alarm System) satellites were launched in the 1960s. But it was only in 2005 that the general public got its first taste of the power of satellite photography, with the launch of Google Earth. Zooming in with ultrahigh resolution on locations both familiar and unfamiliar provides an undeniable voyeuristic thrill -- but the potential of open-access satellite imagery is only beginning to be tapped.
When billionaire aviation pioneer Steve Fossett disappeared last month, crucial rescue workers and volunteers searched for his plane by combing through high-resolution photos snapped by GeoEye, a company that owns two Earth-imaging satellites. And the quality of images should only get better: Last month, DigitalGlobe, the company that provides images for Google Earth, launched its new satellite, WorldView-1. The new satellite will cover 290,000 square miles per day, with a resolution of less than 2 ft., revisiting each spot on average once every 1.7 days. Look up and smile for the camera!
4. Textiles For many people, the first thing that pops to mind when you say "space program spinoffs" is astronaut ice cream -- which, while interesting, is a little too chewy to qualify as a society-altering development. But the Space Race that Sputnik's surprise launch kicked off has produced a surprising number of trickle-down benefits, not all of them obvious.
Some space suits, for instance, contained more than two dozen layers of specially designed textiles, which have been redeployed in various civilian capacities. For example: Teflon-coated fiberglass, first used in the 1970s in space suits, is now found as a roofing material in stadiums around the world, including the 257-ton inflated roof of the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, held up by air pressure.
5. Mars Missions The biggest difference between the pre- and post-Sputnik eras might be that, 50 years ago, we had pretty much finished exploring everywhere we could physically reach. Now there's a universe of unknown destinations that are about as accessible to us as the Americas were to Europeans in 1500, or the North and South Poles were in 1900: We have the tools to get there, but the journey might kill us.
Thanks to new technology, we can take on unthinkable levels of exploration without even sending people -- the rovers that have been trundling around Mars since 2004, space telescopes such as Hubble and the forthcoming James Webb. But President Bush's "Renewed Spirit of Discovery" agenda also calls for a return to the moon by 2020, followed by manned missions to Mars. After that -- well, there are six other planets (seven if you count Pluto) in this solar system alone.
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