Byline: BOB BERMAN
This month marks the half-century anniversary of the first Earth satellite, which set in motion a series of events that remain topsy-turvy even today.
The whole thing was odd. Movies and TV shows of the '50s kept promising that we'd "soon" reach the moon. Yet the president, Dwight Eisenhower, was totally indifferent to the idea of manned space travel, and budgeted exactly nothing toward it. Even when it was clear that the United States could launch a satellite ahead of the Soviets if we green-lighted the Alabama team headed by the Nazi-morphed-into-American rocket designer Werner Von Braun, Eisenhower showed no interest until after Sputnik went aloft.
In that time of bobby socks and Elvis, and American …
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