[FPSPACE] Salute to the Russian achievement....

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

[FPSPACE] Salute to the Russian achievement....
pjp pjp961 at svol.net 
Thu Oct 4 08:32:48 EDT 2007 

> On this 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik,
> I salute our Russian friends whose achievement resulted
> in a new era of Mankind.
>
> Hats off to the Space Age!
>
> I was not born yet, nor would be for quite some time,
> but the echoes of that day are still with us.

 I'm afraid to disappoint you, PJP, that to those of us
 who were in fact born back then - and, say, 10 years old -
 it's not Sputnik and the dawn of the Space Age that is
 our first 'global' memory of the year 1957.

 Instead it is the memory of regular detonations of ever
 more powerful hydrogen bombs over Bikini Atoll and over
 Novaya Zemlya that first come to mind when the year 1957
 goes whispering into the ear. Mind you, these detonations
 were always accompanied by IKE or XPYIII,EB promising to
 drop samples of the latest such beast over unfriendly
 territory as and when required.

 Also, however fine an achievement the dawn of the Space
 Age looks in retrospective, it is still but a modest
 consolation for the great hopes held in the 1950es that
 unlimited energy from nuclear fusion was imminent.

 With that in mind I haste to add my late salutation to
 the Sputnik team and their inheritors.

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark