The Traveling Companion

October 5th marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, which TIME describes thusly:

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, and the U.S. reacted the way any mature, technologically savvy nation would — which is to say we lost our marbles.

This quote comes from its photo-essay commemorating the anniversary, which lists the "highs and lows of space exploration", from the moon landing to the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts and more. As for the moon landing:

So, here was the proposal: The nation that had launched precisely one astronaut into space on one mission that had lasted 15 minutes was going to put a man on the moon in less than nine years, bring him home alive, and do it all before the Russians — who, let's face it, had a surer hand with this kind of thing than we did — could. Oh, and this bright idea came from the man who had signed off on the Bay of Pigs.

No mention of "the Russians used a pencil", but there are more harrowing moments that sometimes get lost in histories of the "space race".

Here's a syllogism every astronaut knows: Space pilots are test pilots; test pilots die; therefore, space pilots will die. The key is not to be one of them.

Legendary author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke was asked for his thoughts on Sputnik by IEEE Spectrum. Obviously, he provides a perspective that few others could:

Launching Sputnik and landing humans on the Moon were all political decisions, not scientific ones, although scientists and engineers played a lead role in implementing those decisions. (I have only recently learned, from his long-time secretary Carol Rosin, that Wernher von Braun used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon—like the South Pole—was reached half a century ahead of time.

One tangential thing that struck me while reading the TIME photo-essay and during my consequent (and inevitable) jaunt through Wikipedia is what it must be like to be any astronaut not named Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin (the list may also include John Glenn, Alan Shepard, and Jim Lovell). Take, for example, John Young. He flew two Gemini missions (smuggling the first corn beef sandwich in space onto Gemini 3), two Apollo missions (testing the lunar module on Apollo 10, and setting the moon speed record with the lunar rover on Apollo 16), and two shuttle missions (the first, STS-1, as well as the first to use Spacelab, STS-9) — the only man to command missions in all three programs. Quite a career, if you ask me, but spent in relative obscurity.