The Sputnik Vector

There seems to me to have been a change of direction in America's attitude toward learning in the past fifty years that I would like to term "The Sputnik Vector". This explains much about the U.S. and the world today. In 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik was launched as the first satellite to orbit the earth. America's reaction to it created the Sputnik Vector.

According to news reports, the American rocket community and those of other western countries did not really consider Sputnik as a big deal. It was an aluminum sphere about the size of a basketball with a radio transmitter emitting beeps as it orbitted the earth. Newsweek reported that the U.S. had actually weighed down a test rocket with sand prior to Sputnik so that it would not go into orbit. But the media and the public perceived that Sputnik represented a falling behind in technical capability.

The result was a new emphasis in American learning on science and technology. The most obvious was the Apollo missions to the moon and the robot spacecraft missions to explore the planets. I actually see the most important result of space exploration not as the moon landings but as the Hubble Space Telescope. Back on earth, the media in the sixties manifested the Sputnik Vector with popular television shows like Lost in Space and Star Trek.

The Sputnik Vector ultimately returned to earth in the form of the internet. It became more about technology than science. The Sputnik Vector continued to produce terrestrial fruit with personal computers, windows, global positioning systems, cell phones (just like on Star Trek) and satellite and cable TV.

But the Sputnik Vector did not come without a price. It came at the expense of history, geography and foreign languages in education. We had redistributed the learning pie in the direction of technology without increasing the pie. So, some things had to become comparitively more neglected.

The Vietnam War was very much afftected by the Sputnik Vector. There was more emphasis on high-tech warfare than there was on understanding the people we were fighting with and against. The public reaction to the Communist Tet Offensive in early 1968 mirrored the reaction to Sputnik. The Offensive was not really a military success but the public perceived it as a testament to the ineffectuality of the war effort.

The Sputnik Vector is why today we can spy on other countries with space age gadgetry without really understanding the people we are spying on. It is why the CIA can listen into the conversations of potential enemies but have no one to translate them. It is why we have satellites that can watch anyone in the world but those watching do not know a Sunni from a Shiite Moslem.

I was caught up in the Sputnik Vector myself. I landed in the U.S. as an eight year old in the autumn of 1968. The space program was close to putting a man on the moon and I could not get enough of reading about space. The result is today the blog you are reading and my other scientific writing. But yet, I also consider it vital to understand the world and I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea of shutting out the outside world.

The Sputnik Vector created one America at the expense of another. In a way, the 9/11 attack was a clash between the two. If the Sputnik Vector had never come about and the non-Sputnik America had happened, we would have fewer technical capabilities than we do today and you may not be reading this blog now. But we would understand the world better and 9/11 may not have happened.