The Space Race became front page news and filled the airwaves. We watched each new launch and recovery with rapt attention as Walter Cronkite and others described in detail what was happening. We were all there when that first Mercury Redstone rocket with a small manned capsule on top rocketed off on May 5, 1961 and the name Alan Shepard became known in every household.
There were seven Mercury astronauts who’d trained to broach the final frontier of space. While this country was so engaged the Russians had begun their own program of exploration. The Cold War thus took on another dimension and the need for American supremacy in space became a priority, politically and scientifically.
We saw the trials and tribulations of the space program. The successes and disastrous failures were all there right in our living rooms on television sets that had long since replaced the old radios that once stood in their place.
How well I remember the voice of Walter Cronkite heralding each new launch in those early days and demonstrating what was going to happen using what are now primitive graphics and video. Then, they were state of the art and we marveled at them.
Those were the days long before personal computers and the internet. We saw the geometric expansion of technology that started during that time and today we have a cornucopia of electronic marvels that were only dreamed of in science fiction novels during the 1950’s.
Fifty years have come and gone and we’ve witnessed the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs that have seen humans land on the moon, the setting up of a satellite network for communications and weather observation and by products in the medical and electronic industry. The personal computer we’ve all come to take for granted is an offshoot of the research and development that went into the effort to conquer the space beyond our planet's atmosphere.
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