Word: sputnik
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Last weekend at Carpenter Center the devil spit the universe out of his mouth and laughed. A sign of recognition went up from the audience: Ah, another origin-of-the-universe cartoon." It was an Italian movie, FantaBiblical, good news for post-Sputnik man, the fallen Catholic's Chariot of the Gods, the ten commandments as the fallout of a mid-space collision. Nothing is sacred; everything is permitted...
...SPUTNIK. It was the earth's only other satellite except the moon, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, hurtling around the planet at 18,000 m.p.h. An NBC radio announcer that October in 1957 bade his audience: "Listen now, for the sound which forever separates the old from the new." And over thousands of radios, from somewhere in space, came an eerie beep ... beep ... beep...
...cautious Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower. In its first year of operation, HEW's budget was a mere $5.4 billion, of which $3.4 billion went for Social Security. Immediately the department became a political issue, as congressional Democrats pressured Ike to increase funding. He held off until the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Then the first significant breach was made in hold-the-line spending. Fearful that the Russians might surpass the U.S. in science and technology, the President backed the National Defense Education Act, which authorized $900 million in aid to schools and colleges, especially for scientific study...
...program, all students, including science majors, were required to take natural science courses taught from a historical perspective. The requirement originated in the praiseworthy idea that scientists should be introduced to the social implications of science and the moral issues it involves. But two years after Sputnik frightened America into expanding its science education program, the Faculty stopped using the historical method in its Gen Ed sciences courses and allowed science students to bypass Gen Ed science courses altogether. Apparently the Faculty was persuaded by a Faculty committee's call for "a larger pool of scientists," and allowed their liberal...
...after it was sent aloft in September with no one on board, Soyuz 25 tried to link up with it, apparently as part of the Kremlin's celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution and the 20th anniversary of the flight of the first earth satellite, Sputnik. But Soyuz 25 slammed into one of Salyut's two docking ports, holding only briefly and then drifting away. Soviet controllers had to summon the cosmonauts back to earth...