About the Author   |   Author Tour Information

From the Author: Paul Dickson

"For many of us born before the 1950s, the fascination and astonishment engendered be the launch of Sputnik remain fresh in our minds. Like many of my generation, I can recall exactly where I was when I heard about Sputnik's launch. I was eighteen years old, a college freshman at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. A friend stopped me in the middle of the campus to say that he had heard about it on the radio. Instinctively, we both looked up."

"Within hours I would actually hear its signal rebroadcast on network radio. Before the weekend was over, I got to hear it directly on a shortwave radio as it passed overhead."

"Not only could you hear Sputnik, but, depending on where you were, it was possible to see it with the naked eye on certain days in the early morning or the late evening when the Sun was still close enough to the horizon to illuminate it. While standing in the middle of the college football field a week or so after the launch, I first saw the satellite scooting across a dark evening sky orbiting the Earth at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour. Watching Sputnik traverse the sky was seeing history happen with my own eyes. To me, it was as if Sputnik was the starter's pistol in an exciting new race. I was electrified, delirious, as I witnessed the beginning of the Space Age."

"My mother, the late Isabelle Dickson, is in large part responsible for this book. She was the consummate space enthusiast who never missed a televised launch and who read everything she could on the subject. Even when my interest flagged, she always wanted to talk about space: what was next, what it was all about. She belonged to a current events club - the Up-to-Date Club - where she and other women delivered talks on topics that they had taken on as an avocation. My mother dabbled in other subjects, but she always came back to space. She claimed it as her first love."

"In September 1999, a year after her death, I got around to unpacking the box of space papers that she had carefully assembled over the years. The box contained such items as the first prayer from space, which hung over her desk for years, and a small pile of notes she had taken on the weekend of the first Moon landing. Her bibliography 'Astronomy, Satellites and Space' was useful in preparing this book."

"If nothing else, the box of space oddments underscored the span of the one true outside-of-the-family adventure that helped define her rich life. Like others, she had been mesmerized by the photographic images coming back from the Moon and the potential for using satellite images to better life on earth. One of her papers on space, which she delivered in 1972 contained this line, 'Now, fifteen year later, it is difficult to recall the devastating effect of Sputnik 1.'"

"Now, more than forty years later, I have tried to give that 'devastating effect' its due."

"This book is dedicated to her."

Long fascinated with space and the cold war, Washington journalist Paul Dickson is the author of more than forty books on diverse topics, including two works of investigative journalism, Think Tanks and The Electronic Battlefield. He lives in Garrett Park, Maryland, with his wife.