Sputnik
Someone reminded yesterday Thursday was the anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, and that it was 50 years ago. It was little more than 50 years since men had
left the earth in heavier than air aircraft, and then had left the atmosphere. And how that has changed out lives in so many ways, with satellite TV, satellite mapping and so on, so that the world has become much less of a mystery.

We use satellite technology every day without thinking about it, and it has become such a part of our lives that we don't often think of what life was like without it.

But I remember the excitement of the time. My mother, who was born just after heavier-than-air aircraft took to the skies, thought it was wonderful. I was at a boarding school, and we were allowed out of evening prep to watch Sputnik sweep across the sky.

People from scientific institutes came to our school and showed us the Sputnik signal on oscilloscopes, and we took photographs of that historic sight.

A few months later a bigger satellite went up, with a dog in it, leading to the rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle, the physicists fiddle
The rocket jumped over the moon
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And died the following June.

And we all remembered that the dog's name was Laika.

But after that we became blase about it. I can't remember who the first man in space was, though it became a bit more interesting when the first men landed on the moon.

A couple of years later the first telecommunications satellite was launched, and that even earned itself a pop song, Telstar. Actually there weren't any words to it, so it wasn't really a song, But it was popular.

But now we take it mostly for granted -- yet could LiveJournal exist without satellite technology?