Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.

Freedom and Intimacy

Talking to a friend who is thinking of starting a blog, I thought about what I like about blogging. It goes back to what Dr. Charles Harris used to say we all want from relationship: freedom and intimacy.

You there, sitting in an armchair, or even in bed, with your iPad2, I believe you have a feeling of great intimacy with the mind of the person you are reading. If you didn’t, you would be on some other page of the world wide web, reading some other columnist or blogger. Hopefully you don’t read only those you agree with, but nevertheless, you are meeting the writer on some level, finding your way to his inmost, essential thoughts, what he has in mind at a particular moment, usually quite recently in time.

That writer gets to write what is in his mind freely and with great honesty, exactly because you have the freedom to move to another page if you like. The writer writes, knowing that someone, perhaps you, is meeting him in language you both understand in some fundamental way.

Most blogs have a subject around which they turn. I realized you could have a project blog after seeing the artist Leigh Toldi’s [www.toldileigh.blogspot.com]. She writes about her work. In some respects the blog becomes her work, but really it’s like a “making of” documentary, the story of how her drawings and paintings get made. Knowing a little about the artist’s thoughts helps people to understand it. You know the artist intimately, not in a personal way, but because of what she tells you about her work.

This is a “making of” blog. It is a description of some of what I am thinking about as I work on “The Pastor’s Kids”. When you are writing from the inside of a character, you cannot put all the background information in. The narrative flows around what the character is experiencing. Especially for kids, it may be only later that they realize what was going on. But the background is there, nevertheless.

Perhaps you are not interested in the minute particulars of what I am thinking about at this moment. I am free to write them, but you are free to turn to another page!