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MY SPACE RACE ...in a world of spin-offs
Part 1:
In the last thirty years of my autobiographical writing, 1984 to 2014, I have used many templates or frameworks, devices and arrangements, patterns and plans, in which to provide a perspective on my life-narrative. The template or framework below involves the space race.
The 'Space Race' was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for supremacy in spaceflight capability. The race took place from 1955 to 1972. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and it was also symbolic of ideological superiority. This 'Space Race' spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon.
The competition began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of their intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union beat the US to this, with the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. The competition peaked with the July 20, 1969 US landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11, and it concluded in a period of détente with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew.1
Part 2:
This space race was part of the back-drop of my life from the age of 11 to 31. In the northern summer of 1955 I was about to enter grade 4 and to begin my 9 year baseball career from late childhood to late adolescence. My mother had also just begun to take me along to what were then called, and still are, "Baha'i firesides".
In the southern winter of 1975 I was lecturing at the Box Hill Institute of Technical and Further Education in Melbourne Australia, and I was the secretary of a small Baha'i group in Kew Victoria, and just about to enter my second marriage. In 1969 I was teaching primary school in Canada when the first men landed on the moon, and in 1972 I was teaching high school in Australia when a more cooperative relationship between the USA and the USSR began.
Those two decades were a period of vast change in my life-narrative from being a primary school student in Canada to a university graduate and, as I say above, on my way to a second marriage which, by December 1975, had two children, and in Melbourne Australia. I won't give you chapter and verse of all the major events of those two decades in either the space race or in my own life-race.
I will mention, though, that those 20 years were a period of the exploration and the defining, the emerging and the consolidating of my raison d'etre, my modus operandi, my modus vivendi, my cosmology, my personal mythology, my religious and philosophical position, a position I still hold as I go through my 70s.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, and 2Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 23/12/'14.
Part 3:
The Space Race had its origins
in the missile-based arms race
that occurred following WWII,
when both the Soviet Union &
the United States captured the
advanced German technology
and personnel....In those years
I went from the age of 1 to 10:
my personal life-race was on!!
The Space Race has also left a
legacy of communications, and
weather satellites, a continuing
human space presence on that
International Space Station. It
has also sparked many spending
increases on education & research
development which led to a host of
beneficial spin-off technologies in
the years of my life: 1973 to 2014,
as my own life continued its spin....
Ron Price
23/12/'14.
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