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Ever since I was a young boy I've been fascinated by the stars. Being fascinated by the stars hasn't called me to study astronomy. Rather, I've always loved the sense I get when I look up to the heavens at night, that there's something so massive, so huge about Life that it's too vast for me to comprehend, too infinite for me to wrap my mind around - it dwarfs me a million billion trillion times over.
When the Soviet space agency launched Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite on Friday October 4, 1957, my Dad and I went to a window on the top floor of our home to look for it in the night sky. I remember my trembling excitement as it first showed up exactly where we expected it to: a tiny light moving north across the stars, low on the eastern horizon. It was just a tiny moving light. But the thing of it was no such light had ever been seen before in the entire history of mankind until that moment. Even at seven years old, I knew what an airplane flying at night looked like. Its lights flashed red and green. I even knew what a shooting star looked like. It suddenly showed up moving at tremendous velocity across the sky and then flamed out, almost as soon as it began. But nothing like the smooth steady tiny light of Sputnik had ever been seen before, moving it seemed quite leisurely across the sky, belying the fact it took Sputnik a mere ninety eight minutes to complete one orbit of Earth.