George Rebane
The speech was delivered in a workmanlike manner by President Barack Obama, one of the best public speakers in the land. But its content was so flawed that I thought it best to not say anything at all about it, primarily because it was immediately dissected so assiduously by so many conservative pundits – secondarily, because I didn’t know where to start in order to say something new. But after letting the sun rise on it a couple of times, I thought ‘what the hell’, and here is my two cents worth.
First and foremost, the President directed his speech at an accepting audience consisting mainly of the pre-educated and the cognitively disabled. I don’t think he belongs to either group, and most certainly neither do his handlers and speech writers. He and his are simply ideologues with a profound misunderstanding of history, and an almost total innocence about things economic. From the litany of defects in the speech, let me just pick a couple to vent on.
The President claimed that his “Sputnik moment” for us today was inspired by our reaction to the Soviets’ October 1957 launch of the namesake satellite – the first to orbit earth. He went on to expound that our science “did not yet exist” to replicate the feat, and that it was the then visionary government which kicked things into gear to launch our first satellite, and proceed on to win the race to the moon. Wrong.
A rudimentary reading of our early space technology history reveals that before Sputnik we had commissioned the Vanguard program to build a new smaller rocket (image nearby) that could place a grapefruit-sized satellite into orbit. This was in 1956 and before NASA was founded in 1958. In the interval the Soviets took one of their large in-service ballistic missiles, stuck a small basketball sized satellite in its nose, and programmed it to go into low earth orbit instead of head for New York.
After our Vanguard rocket exploded a couple of times, one of our engineers asked why we couldn’t do the same thing with one of our existing Redstone (renamed the Jupiter-C) rockets. Bingo, our first satellite was up in January 1958. It turns out that our science was there and waiting all through those years, and it was only government bureaucracy that prevented the practical solution from being used.
For the record, Vanguard did launch our second satellite in March 1958. It was the first solar-powered satellite orbited and distinguishes itself to this day by being the oldest satellite still in orbit, and likely to stay there for the next two hundred years or so (unless we bring it down and stick it in the Smithsonian). So all the bullcrap about starting to play catch-up with the Soviets is just that. But the President did get it right that we used technology originally created by government visionaries – what his people forgot to put in his mouth was that the government Werner von Braun and his team were working for at the time was called the Third Reich. (The other half of that team was kidnapped by the Soviets after WW2.)
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American progressives cum socialists frequently wax eloquent about the Scandinavian forms of governance, and pointedly ask ‘why can’t we be like that?’. What is the ‘that’ that so enamors them to countries like Denmark and Norway? Norway especially is the oft-cited posterchild of “socialist capitalism”. Perhaps this is because we recall the beauty of the country, its music, and enthusiastic fluff pieces that regularly appear in our media. One such offering, published as ‘In Norway Start-ups say Ja to Socialism’ on Inc.com, is typical, and was cited in these pages to underline and give meat to the argument that a more collective America would get us all closer to those pristine landscapes and happy peoples.
