Remember Sputnik? Fifty years ago this October 4, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Even a mere grade-schooler, as I was at the time, felt the shock of the moment. Nor was I immune to the fallout from the Soviet achievement: Sputnik caused Americans to question the quality of the education their kids were getting, and the pressure was soon on the schools for tougher standards and higher levels of achievement, particularly in math and science.

So much for a kid’s perspective. One of the most astute adult observations on the event came from journalist and former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers, who was then writing for William Buckley’s conservative journal, National Review. In a letter to Buckley, Chambers wrote:

They still do not see the point. The satellite is not the point. The point is the rocket that must have launched it. Of course, the scientists and the ranking military chiefs must have grasped this obvious implication at once. But it took three or four days for the organically stupid press to catch on. Consternation, of course. Add in this datum: The satellite passed over Washington. One minute later it passed over New York. We have entered a new dimension. Like Goethe after the Battle of Valmy, we can note in our journals: "From this day dates a new epoch of history; and you can say that you were there." Doubtless, the Americans will soon launch bigger and better moons. That, too, is not the point. Again, the point is: the battle for space is on.

The battle for space was indeed on. Within five years of the launching of Sputnik, President John Kennedy committed this country to landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s –- a goal that was reached in 1969.

But as an editorial in last week’s Economist observed, the most significant and enduring consequence of the space race has been to make us look more closely at our own planet. “The biggest mental change wrought by spaceflight,” says the editorial, “has not been an appreciation of the vastness of the universe, but rather of the smallness, fragility and unity of Earth.”

So the most penetrating comment of all on the long-term effect of Sputnik may well have been written a dozen year before the satellite was launched. It came from a poet, T.S. Eliot, who wrote in The Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of our all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”