The Beep heard around the world (Happy Space Day)

It is yet another public holiday for Guy. I tell you, if it were up to me today would be a public holiday.

Anyway, exactly 50 years ago to the day on the cool Russian Steppe a massive, overpowered (for it's time) R-7 Semyorka Ballistic missile sat on a launch pad in the (also at that time) super-secret Star City (Baikonur cosmodrome) launch facility. At the tip lay not a nuclear warhead as the Semyorka was designed to deliver, but a small, 58 CM wide sphere filled with gas and a single, beeping radio transmitter. The Semyorka was powerful enough to put a nuclear warhead onto American soil so it seemed reasonable to assume that it could also propel the small sphere into that great unknown area of space. If the math was right, the sphere might even stay in orbit.

The Semyorka had already had a few... glitches prior to October 4, and the Russians were a little nervous (one flight was rather fiery and explosevy...), but as dawn approached, the button was pushed and the little sphere was sent to make history.

Sputnik literally means "Satellite" or "Orbital Companion", but its simple beginnings set in motion an amazing series of events. That little sphere orbited for 11 days before reentering in the Earth's Atmosphere.

In the next 50 years, mankind would go even further;

Landing on the Moon, building a space station, and reaching out with mechanical fingers to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and even beyond the Solar System.

We have looked inward, outward, and strange-ward (I love Quantum Physics :D), and we have nowhere to go but up.

Yep, 50 years ago a sphere just a little over 2 feet in diameter opened the door for these very things.

It's a Global Holiday! :D

Happy Space Day, everyone! :D

---Me.