October 4 · This Day in America
A polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, trailing four whip antennas, lifts off a launch pad in the Kazakh desert and becomes the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. The Soviet Union calls it Sputnik. Within hours, ham radio operators across the United States are tuning in its steady beep — a sound coming from space, passing over American rooftops every ninety minutes. The country that had assumed it owned the future feels the ground shift under it. Out of that shock comes everything: NASA, born ten months later; a flood of money into science classrooms; a president's promise to put a man on the Moon. The race that ends with a bootprint in lunar dust starts here, with a beep no one in America could ignore, and a night sky that suddenly belonged to everyone.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1927
Sculptor Gutzon Borglum begins carving four presidents into a granite face in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It will take fourteen years, four hundred workers, and a great deal of dynamite — most of the rock blasted away, then refined with drills to coax out an eye, a brow, a sixty-foot stone gaze. The mountain was sacred to the Lakota, and the taking of it is part of the story too. Borglum would not live to see it finished.
Source: www.britannica.com
“In the Open West, you learn to live closely with the sky. It is a part of your life. But now, somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien.”Lyndon B. Johnson, on the night Sputnik launched, 1957