2011 Vun11Februaryce der rokets is up

It's Time For A New Narrative; It's Time For 'Big History'





Enlarge AFP/Getty Images

The front page of the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda after the 1957 launch of Sputnik.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/02/10/133652898/its-time-for-a-new-narrative-its-time-for-big-history?sc=fb&cc=fp

What a wonderful series of blog posts and comments this week on where we are in science education!

Picking up on this, I'd like to go back to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address where he spoke of our "Sputnik moment." I'll first revisit the original Sputnik moment in 1957, then compare it our current situation and finally offer some general thoughts on the role of science in our lives.

In the original Sputnik moment, nicely described here, the Soviets launched a 180-pound beeping object into a pre-determined orbit, quickly following with a >1,000-pound satellite carrying a dog and food for her 100-hour orbit. (She didn't survive).

Meanwhile, the United States still hadn't gotten its 3-lb. item off the pad. The result was pandemonium:

The Soviets will be "dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses." —Sen. Lyndon Johnson

"What is at stake is nothing less than our survival." —Sen. Mike Mansfield

"A severe blow — some would say a disastrous blow — has been struck at America's self-confidence and at her prestige in the world. Rarely have Americans questioned one another so intensely about our military position, our scientific stature, or our educational systems." —Sen. Lister Hill

The response was the National Defense Education Act (note the D-word), pumping a billion dollars over four years (a lot back then) into student loans and science-classroom improvements.

Institutions like NASA were founded and the aeronautics industry was further buffed up. And we got the job done: first-man-to-the-moon 10 years later. We won the space race, the arms race and the Cold War. And then we drifted back into 40 years of generalized science-education apathy.



Cassi Creek:

“Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.



"once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department," says wernher von Braun.”

In the interest of winning the race with the Soviets to control as much of near-Earth space as possible from the planet’s surface, we spent the end of WWII and the months following scouring Germany for German scientists and engineers. We overlooked their participation in war crimes against civilians. We brought them with their families to the U.S. We found ways to grant them U.S, citizenship.

We wound up with von Braun’s team, the designers and builders of Germany’s V-2 single stage liquid fueled destroyer of neighborhoods. Basically unguided, it launched and descended in obedience to the laws of ballistics, motion, and mass.

We hauled what we could back to our side of the world to experiment with and improve upon. The Soviets took their share of Germans and put them to work on heavy lift tasks, envisioning from the start a ballistic weapon to cross polar icecaps and oceans.

When Sputnik orbited, the U.S. was shaken to its core. From priding ourselves as the pre-imminent aerospace power in the world, we were suddenly upstaged by a totalitarian state that was proving our conceptions of it to be largely wrong.

Russia, and the USSR, had launched using the brute force mechanism with a huge launch vehicle that was Russian in nature. We, the U.S. were working on three different military programs, all of which were less than capable. I can recall watching almost nightly newsreels showing one or more of our rockets self-destructing or being destructed for safety reasons. We were surprised, unpleasantly, and giving in to panic and haste.

Our German scientists had no interest in actually allowing a pilot control of their creations. Most of them had little regard for the pilots/astronauts chosen to fly the spacecraft if it ever became reality. The pilots, on the other hand, were pilots and behaved accordingly, gradually winning some of their demands from the design team.

While all this took place, we were frantically trying to churn out more engineers, physicists, chemists, and other hard science professionals to staff our design and construction teams. NASA did succeed in putting people on the moon and with the demise of Apollo; the moon once again became a distant and unoccupied orb.

For all the effort, for the lost lives, for the goals met and exceeded in exploring space, we have come to rely on Russia to provide the heavy lift and resupply missions that keep our lonely international space station in low earth orbit.

Most of the Germans we captured are gone now. Many of the NASA teams have retired and more will soon as the U.S. space program is downsized. Now there is a European space consortium, a Japanese program, and Indian program and China wants to become dominant. We’ve allowed our grasp of math, physics, and engineering to fade away again, just as we did in the 1950s. We stand less chance of defeating China than we did the USSR. China didn’t capture any Germans. It did see the relevance in training Chinese to compete with the rest of the world and has long excelled in that. Then there are the opportunists who work the rogue nation programs, Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan’s contribution to them.

Von Braun once joked about learning to count backwards in Chinese. I never believed it was a joke.

“You too may be a big hero,

Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.

"In German or English I know how to count down,

Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.”



Shabbat Shalom!