Word: sputnik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Washington hands can tell you that Sputnik changed the capital for good that night. There were suggestions that the U.S. declare a national emergency and conduct an all-out effort to catch up. "Know thine enemy" became the slogan of the day, and schools began offering courses in Russian. The race to conquer the heavens predated even the cold war; when Soviet and American troops entered Germany, they scanned their lists of prisoners for rocket scientists they could trundle home. But Sputnik launched the race right into the heart of the superpower rivalry, where it has remained ever since...
This small gem of high-tech miniaturization represents the state of the art in satellite zapping. It is the antisatellite weapon (ASAT) that U.S. scientists have been trying to perfect for more than 25 years, ever since the Soviets launched Sputnik I in 1957 and set off a race to capture what Lyndon Johnson called the "high ground" of outer space...
Dean of the Graduate School of Education Patricia A. Graham likens the current pseudofrenzy to the American reaction to the Launching of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviets in 1957. That event, considered the formal beginning of the superpower "space race," raised concern that America's school, were not doing their job in producing technology whizzes who could rival the Soviets...
...after raising six children. Her re-entry came at the nadir for Latin in the U.S. In 1976 just over 150,000 American public high school students took the language, down a disastrous 79% from the 1962 peak of 702,000. "Latin went into a slump with the Sputnik era, with its concentration on science and technology," she recalls. And she says, "Then came the permissive age," the 1960s and early 1970s, when demands for so-called relevancy in course content pushed many schools to reduce or abandon classical studies and language instruction...
While the U.S. shuttle coursed through its eight-day mission, the Soviets were marking a significant space anniversary. It was on Oct. 4, 1957, that Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, was launched, its thin, metallic beep announcing that the space age had begun. Since then, the Soviets have scored a notable string of other cosmic firsts: the first animal in space (a dog), the first man, the first woman. The first space walk was taken by a cosmonaut. The first pictures of the moon's hidden side were shot by an orbiting Soviet camera...