Something I’ve been fascinated by in the past year, is this construct called the Military Industrial Complex. This name that Eisenhower assigned to the machine in society which encourages advancement, discovery, and even war.

See Also:
• Book Review: State of Fear
• The Modernist 18
• The Modernist 18A

One of the key events of the Space Race, occurred 50 years ago today: The 50th anniversary of the launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik:

The success of Soviet engineers in launching Sputnik stunned the world, and was followed just four years later by another historic achievement — the launch of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.

Sputnik galvanized the United States to pour money into space research and technology with the goal of landing a man on the moon — an event that occurred in 1969.

However, back in the day, the State of Fear was galvanized around another idea: The Soviets could put a warhead into space.
And the United States couldn’t.

That was the State of Fear in the United States, but in the Soviet Union, it wasn’t so much. I really appreciated this New York Times article

It was an unprepossessing agent of alarm. A simple sphere weighing just 184 pounds and not quite two feet wide, it had a highly polished surface of aluminum, the better to reflect sunlight and be visible from Earth. Two radio transmitters with whiskery antennas issued steady signals on frequencies that scientists and ham operators could pick up, and so confirm the achievement.

The Russians clearly intended Sputnik as a ringing statement of their technological prowess and its military implications. But even they, it seems, had not foreseen the frenzied response their success provoked.

When the Soviet dictator Nikita S. Khrushchev received word of the launching, he was of course pleased, and he and his son, Sergei, turned on the radio to listen to the beeping Sputnik. They went to bed, the son remembers, without realizing “the immensity of what was happening during those hours.”

And

One of the intriguing might-have-beens of history is: What if Americans had deployed the first satellite?

Would there have even been a Space Race, knowing what we know now about the Infrastructure of the failed Soviet Union?
Would we have gone to the moon last century?
Would we have a Space Station?

Another sobering thought. Mankind entered Space 50 years ago
For over 27 of those years it was done with the Space Shuttle.