Reaching the climax of the Information Era that Sputnik 1 opened sixty years ago.

The Peace of God to all that belong to the Light,
Dear Readers,

This January 4th of 2018 was the sixty anniversary of the end of the active life of the Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite ever orbiting the earth, also the first artifact sending signals from the earth's orbit ever.

Please check:
sixty years since Sputnik, the satellite that changed the world

When Sputnik was launched in orbit in October 4th 1957 few could know exactly how this so important event was going to change humanity but everybody was sure that it was opening an entire new era in science and technology and it was going to make relatively smaller the world for the generations to come.

Koroliev and the Sputnik I

It was no doubt a shock in America since people in 1957 was unable to understand how it was possible that this satellite was successfully launched in space by the USSR when the United states by that time was already counting about 16 failed attempts to do something similar.

It was the relative more advanced technology in control as well as the more powerful soviet rockets the ones that made possible this huge leap for humanity. Soviet Engineers were already aware of the best techniques of Robust Control that were decisive to explain the overwhelming first achievements of their space program thanks to the so important contribution of Liapunov Stability Analysis that were already found by the so famous Russian Mathematician since the XIX century, something not yet known or fully understood in the west by 1950s.

Sputnik, the start of the space race

Lyapunov stability is named after Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov, a Russian mathematician who defended the thesis The General Problem of Stability of Motion at Moscow University in 1892.

A. M. Lyapunov was a pioneer in successful endeavoring to develop the global approach to the analysis of the stability of nonlinear dynamical systems by comparison with the widely spread local method of linearizing them about points of equilibrium. His work, initially published in Russian and then translated to French, received little attention for many years

The interest in it suddenly skyrocketed during the Cold War period when the so-called "Second Method of Lyapunov" was found to be applicable to the stability of aerospace guidance systems which typically contain strong nonlinearities not treatable by other methods.

The thread is opened to meditate in the great changes that the telecommunications via satellite have performed in our civilization, something that by the way was predicted to occur more than a decade before the Sputnik flight by the Science fiction author Arthur C Clark.

Pls check

Arthur C Clark 1945 Proposal for Geostationary Satellite communications


Thanks for your attention,

The Angel of Lightness

The peace of God to all that belong to the light,
Dear Readers

We are closing this week the 60 anniversary of a event that became a milestone of the Space race and the era of telecommunications, the launching of the first artificial satellite of our planet, the Sputnik 1.

I am going to dedicate this post to some of the most memorable quotes about the role of Sputnik in the History of Civilization.

I want to focus my attention in a positive perspective of History, so that is the orientation of the quotes I have selected to share.

Both countries [Russia and the United States] knew that preeminence in space was a condition of their national security. That conviction gave both countries a powerful incentive to strive and compete. The Soviets accomplished many important firsts, and this gave us a great incentive to try harder.

The space program also accomplished another vital function in that it kept us out of a hot war. It gave us a way to compete technologically, compete as a matter of national will. It may have even prevented World War III, with all the conflict and fighting focused on getting to the moon first, instead of annihilating each other. There’s no evidence of that, but as eyewitness to those events, I think that’s what happened.”
– American astronaut Scott Carpenter quoted in Into that Silent Sea (p. 138).

The principal impetus for my entering a career in science … was the successful launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the then current belief that science and technology was going to be where the action was in the coming decades. 

— Richard E. Smalley

From 'Richard E. Smalley: Biographical', collected in Tore Frängsmyr (ed.), Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 1996 (1997). 

Listen now for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the new.
[Introducing the beep-beep chirp transmitted by the Sputnik satellite.] 

— NBC Radio

NBC radio announcer on the night of 4 Oct 1957. In 'The Nation: Red Moon Over the U.S.',Time (14 Oct 1957)

The successful launching of the Sputnik was a demonstration of one of the highest scientific and technological achievements of man—a tantalizing invitation both to the militarist in search of ever more devastating means of destruction and to the astronomer searching for new means of carrying his instruments away from their earthbound environment. 

— Sir Bernard Lovell

In BBC Reith Lecture (9 Nov 1958), 'Astronomy Breaks Free', published as The Individual and the Universe (1959, 1961), 72. 

Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder :

In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science - really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.

Katherine Patterson, Author of Children Literature works,

More than fifty years ago Sputnik dramatically raised the nation's awareness of what was lacking in science and math education in America. What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good.

Thanks for your attention

Have a nice Night

The Angel of Lightness