MarsBlog.net

Alan Boyle and his readers remember their memories of the event.

Physics Today looks at and links to the history of the Sputnik launch and it’s aftereffects.

David Pescovitz excerpts Arthur C. Clarke’s reaction to the event from an interview in the October IEEE Spectrum.

Republican Congressman John Culberson (TX-7) blogs about the forgotten lesson of Sputnik, while Democrat Senator and Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (NY) uses the anniversary to pitch a science policy long on platitudes and short on substance.

Larry Abramson at NPR recounts how Sputnik spurred a much-needed revival in science education in America, and Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-MI) uses the occasion to look at new federal education initiatives, while Gerald Bracey at HuffPo tut-tuts over how the American “failure” Sputnik represented was turned into an unfair critique of the U.S. public educational system which scars its reputation to this day.

Sputnikmania! — cool clips from what looks like a cool documentary. The John Glenn clip is bizarrely funny, but the director’s commentary makes me wonder about the political slant of the finished product.

And of course, now the truth can be told.

For all the (often legitimate) grief NASA gets, here at least is one thing it’s doing that’s useful in a “NACA airfoil” basic R&D way: NASA To Accelerate Space Nuclear Power:

NASA’s objective will be to use nuclear power much more frequently to open previously isolated areas of the solar system for robotic exploration as early as 2013, Aviation Week reports. NASA is moving quickly to make space nuclear power, and eventually nuclear propulsion, an inherent design element in near term, medium cost planetary missions.

This has come about with development progress in closed-loop Stirling cycle nuclear power systems, which are four times as powerful as the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) used on past missions.

Alan Stern, who heads NASA science programs, is anxious to exploit this maturing technology for robotic exploration, and he wants to move fast. Initial proposals for Discovery and Mars Scout missions that would use Stirling closed-loop nuclear systems are due at NASA headquarters by Nov. 30.

While I’d prefer on principle that this sort of thing be done by private entities, jumpstarting a useful new technology and demonstrating it on ambitious science missions is at least giving us something useful (flight-proven simple nuclear power systems, plus the resulting science data) for a portion of the taxpayer money spent on the agency.