Sputnik's 45th Anniversary

An anonymous reader writes "Today's 45th Anniversary of the day, Oct. 4, 1957, when Sputnik changed the world. "Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation." Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Actually the choice of HAM Radio Broadcast frequencies was neither small nor harmless. NASA HQ WAV Audio."

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October Sky

[cje]

The movie October Sky, based on the book "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickham, is about a group of kids in a West Virginia coal town who become interested in rocketry after the Soviets send up Sputnik. The entire town gathers together on the night of the launch and watches as the spacecraft passes over. A lot of the reactions are pretty humorous ("That thang's gonna drop bombs on us!" "Why don't we just shoot thing damn the down?")

Without giving away too much of the plot, the Rocket Boys become more and more proficient at their craft and eventually get scholarships to attend college, something that saved them from having to work in the coal mines (which 95% of the rest of the town's boys ended up doing.) The main character (Homer) ends up becoming a NASA engineer, training astronauts for Space Shuttle missions. It's a pretty good movie. It's less about Sputnik than it is about American small coal-town life in the 1950s, but it's a pretty accurate snapshot of how things were Back Then (or so I've been told.)

Incidentally, "October Sky" is an anagram of "Rocket Boys." The film was originally titled "The Rocket Boys", but was changed in post-production.