In the decade after World War II, the United States emerged as a world superpower.

It was the Cold War, and the US was at the top of the game, a world leader in production,

innovation, and technology.

And then everything changes on a Friday evening in October of 1957.

And that's when Lyndon Johnson, who is the Senate Majority Leader at the time, is hosting

a barbecue at his ranch in Austin, and a news item comes across the radio.

That says the Soviet Union has made it to space.

They have launched a satellite, the first man-made satellite into space.

It's a report from Man's Farthest Front to Radio Signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik.

The first man-made satellite isn't passed over New York earlier today.

Immediately he and Lady Bird Johnson and their guests walk a path to the nearby river to find a spot

where they can look up at the sky and see if they can see this object.

The sky was like velvet and the stars hung close like brilliant diamonds around us.

Each of us was pondering what the future now held.

And Lyndon Johnson basically, for all-intensive purposes, looks up at the sky and says, oh no.

We had lived with the sky all our lives, and suddenly it was as though we had never seen it before.

He then races back to the house and calls fellow members of the committee that he served on.

And basically says, this is a huge event. We have to have some type of response to this.

He wrote that he was really stunned, and he wanted to reclaim that space race.

And that in order to do that, we needed a more educated workforce. We needed more scientists and

engineers. Very quickly, within weeks or months, he realized that this issue of the country being

humbled and being beaten to space was as much an education issue as it was anything else.

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