Sixty-three years ago – on October 4th, 1957 – my father made history.

     Though I was just a little kid at the time, the memory is crystal clear. Dad came home that day in a tense and mysterious mood, as if something earth-shaking had happened at the office. After supper, with no explanation, he rounded up the family, herded us into the car, and drove us out into the Oklahoma countryside.

     Onto the farm roads we went, that vast network of dirt and gravel roads that segment the Oklahoma prairie into neat mile-square patches. At night, the cropland and pastures lie dark and abandoned, except for the occasional farmhouse.

     With no warning, out in the middle of nowhere, Dad stopped the car, turned off the motor and ordered everyone out – me, my older sister, Francie, my younger brother, Ralph, and my mother, who was just as bewildered as we were.

     Fetching a blanket and flashlight from the trunk, Dad led us down through a bar ditch and out into an open, grass-covered field. And there we sat, huddled on our blanket, attending the strangest picnic ever – no sandwiches, no chips, no soda pop, and no ants. Above us, like jewels set on velvet, a million stars looked down, waiting for something to happen.

     “There it is!” my father shouted, pointing to the horizon.

     Rising in the east we spotted it. Not an airplane. Not a meteor. But something entirely different and very, very weird.

     We surely weren’t the first people in the world to see Sputnik. But neither were we the last. The word “satellite” was new and mysterious. The fact that the 𝘙𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘴 had put it up there made it seem creepy and somehow dangerous.

     Soon it was overhead, then descending in the west, and finally gone.

     “This is going to change everything,” Father told us. “Things we can scarcely imagine.”

     He was right. Without satellites there’d be no GPS, no World Cup broadcasts from distant stadiums, no sky-view images of hurricanes, no broadband connections or multimedia links.

     Well, you say, it was actually the Russians who launched the thing, not your father. True. But my father made history too, didn’t he? Taking us into the field that night and showing us the future.

JUST TO BE CLEAR: Sputnik, only 23 inches in diameter, was actually too small to be seen from Earth. What we saw that October night, gazing up into the heavens, was the second stage of its booster rocket.