Big whoop! Or so you might think.

Sputnik was the size of a basketball and we have a space station in orbit with solar panels the length of the wings of a 747—so, what’s the big deal? If you ask your parents or grandparents, Sputnik was big news, and not good news. October 4^th, 1957, was the day the TV show "Leave It To Beaver" premiered. It was also the day that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shocked America by launching the mysterious Sputnik. The silver satellite sailed over major U.S. cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., transmitting its rhythmic "beep, beep, beep" from the battery operated radio it carried into orbit. It was big news in Moscow which proudly commemorated the event with everything from posters to lapel pins like the one pictured above. NASA wouldn’t come into being for two years, so engineers at Cape Canaveral, who were tinkering with Redstone Rockets and V-2’s captured from the Nazis, knew they had a fight on their hands. That’s how Sputnik started the space race which ended with astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon.

Obviously, Sputnik and the later flight of the first man in orbit, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, figures prominently in my new book "Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program". Along those lines, I wanted to take a moment to say "thanks" to the organizers of a national booksellers’ conference I attended over the weekend in Atlanta. The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance represents bookstores from Washington, D.C. south to Florida and then west to Texas, including Orlando’s own "Urban Think". I got the chance to talk with bookstore owners from all over the Southeast, including many in Florida. Then, the group staged a book signing, which was a great chance to mingle while spending the whole time sitting down.

More to come.