In looking back on the late 40s and 50s, it might appear to be a quiet time when nothing much was happening. Well, in some ways that is true. But the U. S. was engaged in a titanic struggle with the Soviet Union and other communist countries in what came to be known as the cold war. The tension level was high. I clearly remember the Soviets exploding their first atomic bomb and then their first hydrogen bomb. Fear of an all-out nuclear war was widespread and all pervasive.
I was an undergraduate student in 1957 and the first stirrings of space exploration were in the air. On the night of October 4, 1957, I had been studying at the University of Colorado library and on the drive home I turned on my car radio to catch some music. My normal music station instead was broadcasting a very tense news program. It seems the Soviet Union had successfully placed an artificial satellite dubbed Sputnik in orbit about the Earth. The achievement was monumental and clearly indicated that the Soviets were years ahead of us in the area of rocketry. The radio reports kept playing the beep, beep, beep sound Sputnik transmitted as it passed overhead about every 90 minutes. I sat in the driveway for over an hourƯ listening to news reports and that recorded beep over and over. It gave me a fearful, sickening feeling.
Sputnik was like a glass of ice water in the face. All of a sudden, the two sides were engaged in a space race with the Soviets well in the lead. But it wasn't long before the U. S. too was putting up satellites and there began to be serious talk of humans going to the Moon. Meanwhile, life went on and I was deeply immersed in graduate studies
In my latter days of graduate school (late 1962), someone posted three geological quadrangle maps of areas of the Moon on one of the department bulletin boards. How fascinating. I studied the maps for at least a couple hours. The maps were put together from overlapping telescopic images and most of the mapping techniques used were much the same as those we were teaching students in the air photos part of the undergraduate field course. Amazing. The geologists responsible had worked out the sequential order of the mapped rock units to such a degree that they had even devised a Lunar time scale. The Imbrium System. The Preimbrian rocks. I couldn't seem to stay away from those maps. Almost every time I went by and had a few minutes to spare, I'd stop and look them over.
Well,
you'd think that if I was that interested in planetary things that I'd
angle my education in that direction. But, you know, there weren't any
courses in that area, nobody was doing any research with anything along
those lines and nobody even discussed such things. In all of my undergraduate
and graduate education, I cannot recall a single topic having to do with
extraterrestrial geology ever coming up in any of my courses.