During the 'Star Wars' debates of the 1980s I became increasingly curious
about the underlying attitudes towards space policy of people in the United
States. The more I learned about the field the more likely it seemed that
the irrational but indefeasible anxieties expressed in such books as Soviet
Conquest from Space by Peter James, or Strike from Space by Phyllis
Schafty and Chester Ward, had at least part of their origins in the trauma
of the American people's first frustrating and humiliating encounter with
the problems of seeking political advantage from would-be technological
feats in space, the sputniks crisis of 1957-8.1
According to Walt Rostow:
There is no clear analogy in American history to the crisis triggered
by the launching of the Soviet earth satellite on October 4, 1957.
This intrinsically harmless act of science and engineering was also, of
course, both a demonstration of foreseeable Soviet capability to launch
an ICBM and a powerful act of psychological warfare. It immediately
set in motion forces in American political life which radically reversed
the Nation's ruling conception of its military problem, of the appropriate
level of the budget, and of the role of science in its affairs. The reaction
reached even deeper, opening a fundamental reconsideration not only of
the organization of the Department of Defense but also of the values and
content of the American educational system and of the balance of values
and objectives in contemporary American society as a whole