If you were born in 2010 or even 2000 you would most likely feel the same about listening to this as we did watching a documentary on the Wright Brothers and the first time we flew – it’s roughly about same equivalent span of time; 60 years between Kittyhawk and NASA – 60 years (give or take) between NASA and SpaceX.
No doubt, the observers and the pundits who witnessed the Wright Brothers expressed exhilaration and thrill of accomplishment with a goodly amount of apprehension, just as America watched Sputnik in the 1950s and witnessed all the events leading up to the Moon landing in 1969.
In 1960 we were still on the fence – we had no idea, aside from vivid imaginations, what lay inside our own solar system, let alone all those solar systems stretched out in the night sky.
We were still viewing our space program partly as an adventure in Science Fiction and partly as a Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Who was going to find the little Green Men first? Everyone speculated that life outside of earth, and on other planets existed, but what would this life look like? That’s where speculation and imaginations ran off the charts. We had only recently begun thinking that Earth revolved around the Sun, not the other way around. So naturally when it came to imaginations in the 1950s, perceived life on other planets was either Reptilian – exact replicas of us or large, ugly and really-really mean creatures who bore no resemblance to anything, but all knew our languages perfectly and who wanted nothing more than to eat us, enslave us and destroy us. Go figure. The prevailing theory was, whoever it was, they were a lot smarter than us and we were bound to be inferior. If that’s the case, it would lead one to suspect there is a sort of interstellar warning sign that implies Earth should be avoided at all costs – WE are the ugly and really-really mean creatures to be feared. It wouldn’t surprise me.
But here we are in 2024, listening to speculation and discovery in 1960 being presented by some of the best minds in Space exploration at the time. It was one of seemingly endless programs on this brave new future we were embarking on – and it was up to the cooler heads to prevail when it came to jumping into the Space Capsule.
From May 1960 (just around the time of the U2 incident, but that’s another point of alarm) NBC News ran this documentary Worldwide ’60 – Report From Outer Space.
