1965 Space Race

January 22, 1965

I need your help on this one. I could not find the exact article that went with this photo. Send me your best guess which school this is from and if you know who or what is in this photo.

It looks like models of a Saturn 5 rocket, among others, and various satellites.

It is hard to capture the sense of urgency and purpose if you didn’t live through it.
Anyone scanning newspapers from the late 1960’s will find front pages filled with the latest exploits of the astronauts in the race to the moon. It was a national quest carried out on the public stage.

America was on top of the world at the end of the Second World War. They had the atomic bomb, the world’s most powerful air force.

Then the Soviet Union exploded their bomb. With the launch of Sputnik in 1957 they took the high ground, the first artificial earth satellite.
America’s efforts were often a year or more late and usually less impressive.

A short list of Soviet firsts:
1959 first to the moon, Luna 2 unmanned probe
1961 first person to orbit the Earth, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
1963 first woman in space, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova.
1965 first spacewalk, Alexei Leonov.

For years they rocketed ahead of the Americans. We were like the kid whose mom always says, “You know, he tries so hard. Lets give him an A for effort.”

In May of 1961 President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress and challenged the nation to go to the Moon before the end of the decade.

So now it was a matter of national pride.

I did my part, washing down Space Food Sticks with glasses of Tang. Building a plastic kit model of the lunar landing module. Watching space launches live on a tube powered black and white TV. I’d devour every space article in the black and white newspaper.

My family walked out and looked up at the moon in wonder the night Neil Armstrong took one small step for Man. The world prayed for the safe return of three astronauts, while engineers worked overtime to solve the problems when an explosion crippled Apollo 13.

We got more than a few bags of rocks and cool photos. The computer you are using now is the direct result of the jump from the vacuum tube era, to transistors, to integrated circuits.

Your car likely has more computing power onboard than Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 capsule.

We don’t have the same sense of national urgency, pride and discovery today. Like all new things, at some point they aren’t new anymore. Other nations put a high priority on science and engineering educations but for now we seem to have lost interest.

I’d still buy a box of Space Food Sticks.