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Article: The Space Age at 30 // Triumphs and tragedies since the Sputnik breakthrough
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- October 4, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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It has been just 30 years to the day - a full generation, as
most people measure human progress - since the Space Age began.
More than half the people alive on Earth today, including
almost half of all living Americans, were born after the launching of
Sputnik I from a rocket base at Tyuratam, in central Asia just east
of the Aral Sea on the morning of Oct. 5, 1957, Moscow time (the
night of Oct. 4 in the Western Hemisphere).
Sputnik's launching was a global surprise, because a Soviet
breakthrough across the space frontier was not the way the script had
been written. More than two years earlier, the U.S. government had
announced that it would send small, unmanned satellites into ...