Outer Space

When I was a little girl, people wrote make believe stories about traveling in space, but no one had ever been there. Then, when I was 12 years old, the Russians shot up a satellite, called Sputnik, that circled around the earth, way up in space. The main effect on us, here in the United States, was that people started worrying that the Russians were better at math and science than Americans. They thought that American schools should teach more math and science. I don't know if they actually DID teach more math and science, but they were always making us feel that we were not very smart and not very hard-working. They started giving us more homework. But that didn't help me learn how to put satellites in space.

Fortunately, some Americans learned the right stuff and the American space program got better. There is an interesting book, and also a movie, called October Sky by a man named Homer Hickam, who was 14 years old in 1957. He and his friends in a little town in West Virginia were interested in space. They learned about rockets and shot them off themselves. They went to the National Science Fair with their experiments and won a prize. Later Mr. Hickam became a rocket scientist.

In 1969, just before Dan was born, American astronauts walked on the moon. Dan is lucky I didn't name him Neil, after Neil Armstrong, one of the astronauts.