Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

Chapter 18
a Melancholic Space age anniversary
Walter a. McDougall
My sincere thanks to Steven Dick, roger Launius, and the entire space
history and space policy communities for inviting an old dilettante like
myself to this event. Some of you good people I’ve not seen since we
commemorated the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, and some of you doubtless I
shall not have occasion to meet again. that alone makes this a somewhat
melancholy afair for me. But I also have a sense that the 50th anniversary of the
birth of the Space age is draped with a certain melancholy. Do you sense a
mood of disappointment, frustration, impatience over the failure of the human
race to achieve much more than the minimum extrapolations made back in the
1950s, and considerably less than the buoyant expectations expressed as late as
the 1970s? after all, one modest prediction went like this: “there are few today
who do not look forward with feelings of confdence that spacefight will some
day be accomplished. all that we require is to make rocket motors somewhat
larger than those already in existence . . . the pooling of skills already available,
and a good deal of money . . . . We may reasonably suppose that a satellite
vehicle is entirely practicable now and that travel to the moon is attainable in
the next ffty years.” 1 that was Dr. hugh Dryden in 1953, on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ fight. (Indeed, if all of us
interviewed by the media this month have accomplished anything I think we
have at last disabused journalists of the notion that the eisenhower administration
was “surprised” by the frst satellite launch.) But what that means is that all the
satellites, space probes, and human missions launched over 50 years amount
pretty much to what Dryden took for granted would happen. Moreover, the
fact that the Moon landing was achieved just 16 years after he wrote this only
compounds the disappointment that it proved to be a dead end.
that disappointment is also evident, I think, in the false expectation I
expressed this past spring in an essay written for the Foreign policy research
Institute. I began it like this:
1. hugh L. Dryden,“the Next Fifty Years,” Aero Digest (July 1953).