We were out in the yard Sunday night looking for a super moon. Ordinarily, the full moon that comes around this time of year is known as a harvest moon, but since it occurred at the point in its orbit closest to the earth, it was designated a super, because it would look a little bit larger than usual.
The bonus Sunday night was the happenstance of the super moon passing through the shadow of the earth cast by the sun, a lunar eclipse. The last time it happened under these circumstances was 1982 and, if you missed it Sunday, mark your calendar for Saturday, October 8, 2033. I think Alabama will be playing Charleston Southern.
The special sky show was also referred to as a “blood moon” eclipse, mostly because fundamentalist pastor John Hagee called it that in a book he wrote in 2013 tying such an eclipse to The End Times of Biblical prophecy. Since you seem to be reading this right now, the prophecy apparently went unfulfilled this weekend. I hope the pastor has better luck with his Draft Kings picks.
As long as we had our eyes upturned for signs from nature anyway, let’s keep looking skyward as we contemplate how the very earth we stand on was changed forever 58 years ago this month by a hunk of metal hurled 500 miles high by the international Communist conspiracy.
That’s right. It’s Sputnik’s birthday.
To fully grasp how ungraspable the launching of an artificial satellite was in 1957 might cover a dozen TED talks. Man, and the occasional woman, had dreamed of space flight for centuries, but after German scientists demonstrated that liquid-fueled rockets could lob heavy payloads long distances (as Londoners found out the hard way during World War II), America realized that it could make those dreams come true. All they needed were a few of those German scientists, which they picked up at substantially reduced prices as the war was ending.
Unfortunately, the Soviet Union shopped the very same rocket scientist rummage sale, so they amassed their own cadre of missile men. Before long both sides were engaged in what was called a “space race,” with the winner supposedly to obtain domination of the solar system, if not the entire galaxy. Or so it seemed to a kid who assiduously pored the pages of Time and Reader’s Digest and Life magazines, trying to figure out how bellicose statements about orbiting nuclear weapons were supposed to get us to the moon by 1960 (a goal bravely proposed by no less an authority than Popular Mechanics).
The clear advantage the Soviets had over America in the space race was that we had no idea what they were doing. Working in total secrecy in some unpronounceable company town on the steppes of central Asia, the dastardly Commies issued no press releases, published no photos, never invited Walter Cronkite to their launch facilities. Meanwhile, various branches of the U.S. military were quite publicly working on rockets like the Redstone and the Vanguard that sometimes blew up on their launching pads or skittered off course in alarming directions.
By 1957, though President Eisenhower had done what he could to make Americans as placid and untroubled as possible, the citizenry was roiling with barely repressed fears of Communist invasions. (In fairness, the Soviet premier Khrushchev had hadn’t helped matters by telling Americans, “We will bury you!” the year before.) Society had divided into two camps; those who would duck and those who would cover.
Luckily, to drown out the sound of incoming H-bombs, America had developed rock and roll, and 1957 was a banner year for that art form: “All Shook Up,” “Peggy Sue,” “Whole Lotta Shaking,” “I’m Walkin.’” Mom and Dad were likely chilling and repressing with Perry Como or Percy Faith downstairs while the kids played their subversive radios upstairs.
Then on October 4, an altogether different sound was heard on the air. A monotonous pinging issuing forth from what jubilant Soviet propagandists called “Sputnik,” or “traveling companion,” a 184-pound satellite that circled the globe every 95 minutes. Newspaper headlines shrieked about the unexpected celestial interloper, and what passed for Beltway punditry 58 years ago warned that godless Communists might well be on their way to launching giant space shovels with which to tamp down our graves.
Or perhaps not. I may have been watching cartoons on Channel 13 at the time.
I do remember looking at a newspaper chart that showed Sputnik’s orbit passing over our part of the republic, with a timetable calculating the best hours for actually seeing the artificial moon in flight. It seems to me we went out in the front yard a little after sunset a few days later, in that age before a million watts of shopping center illumination obliterated stargazing in our metro area.
Among the familiar orbs that speckled twilight, now there was another, too fast to be a jetliner, too slow to be a meteor. We watched the soft white light trace a path across the firmament. There seemed no threat in Sputnik’s glow, only stunning possibility. The visions of Da Vinci and Jules Verne were coming to pass and we were actually alive to see it.
Sputnik did not stay up long (it plunged back into the atmosphere after but three months in orbit) but its ramifications continue. Once mankind achieved earth orbit, it was only a matter of time before mankind could leave earth orbit. Matt Damon’s in a movie about going to Mars this week, but as you’re reading this, scientists around the world are working to make that happen perhaps by Sputnik’s 75th anniversary.
Here in Birmingham, the super moon settled in behind an impermeable bank of clouds just before totality Sunday night. Not to worry. There’s always going to be something interesting happening somewhere in the sky.