Where No Man Had Gone

We've been talking a lot, in this summer of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, about the American/Russian space race and what led to it.

Two huge events occurred on Friday, October 4, 1957. It was on that afternoon that the Soviet Union put Sputnik I into orbit.  It was the world's first artificial satellite, just about 23 inches in diameter, and it spent 98 minutes orbiting the earth.  And by the time schools opened on Monday the 6th, the nationwide cry of "Why can't our kids be good in math and science like them Russians?" was heard in every PTA, supermarket and bar & grill in the land.  We just had to get up in space right away!

Also that night, 10/4/57, it only took 30 minutes for ABC-TV to show the first ever episode of "Leave It To Beaver" ("Beaver Gets 'Spelled"). The series was to end in 1963, 234 episodes later.

So if history has taught us anything, it shows that it took longer for Americans to get to the moon than it did for Wally Cleaver to finish high school and Beaver to be graduated from 8th grade.

Along the way, brave men like John Glenn paved the way for the steps on the moon of 1969. Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, took off on the Friendship Seven on February 20, 1962, circling the planet three times in five hours as every schoolkid tried to watch it on a 12" black and white TV in the auditorium.

We talked the other night about fireflies, and on that day, Glenn was talking about them as well! As he made his second lap around Earth, he looked out the window of Friendship Seven and saw many many tiny glowing lights!  In fact, his report to Mission Control said he was "in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent." They were yellowish-green, he said, and went on to say that each of them was like "a firefly on a real dark night."

Well, even in those early days of space travel, science guys and ladies knew that even Baltimore fireflies are not meant to be up there among the stars. Glenn said it was some sort of miraculous apparition, but the slide-rule folks down at NASA eventually figured it out:

Glenn's spaceship had a vent system that removed his bodily fluids - you know, like perspiration and tinkle - and shot them into space. At that altitude, liquids freeze at once, and light from the craft made each little teeny frozen pellet light up like a lightning bug.

So there you have it.

Tomorrow, we'll look at another Mystery Of Science: why people fail to wipe down gym equipment after they sweat all over it. And here on Earth, that doesn't make anything miraculous.