Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Sixty years ago, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, paving the way for the official opening of NASA's doors just a few months later, on Oct. 1.
The drive to create an American civilian space agency began with the shocking revelation on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had beaten the US to the punch and launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. The USSR was quick to tout its success in launching Earth's "second moon."
"Sputnik 1 was a phenomenon: You could go see it in your backyard," recalled physicist and engineer Guy Stever, who was on the faculty of MIT at the time, in a 1992 oral history workshop on the origins of the law.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/how-nasa-got-its-start-60-years-ago-sputnik-eisenhower/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 30 2018, @01:42PM
What about the shadow object? Can we conclude that the shadow object is also man-made and didn't exist prior to 1950?
Lemme throw this out there. Consider Gervase of Canterbury [wikipedia.org] and the June 18th, 1178 event. As we know, that was not actually the moon that was observed. I propose that the Medieval Warm Period was early weather war experimentation, possibly with very early steampunk technology. What was observed at Canterbury was actually a boiler explosion in the weather control satellite that the monks were deceived into believing was the moon! Thus, the Medieval Warm Period concluded shortly thereafter as the weather control equipment was no longer functional.