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Sally Ride
"On a fall evening in 1957, October 5th to be precise, America stood watching the skies trying to distinguish the stars from what they hoped to see: the world's first satellite - orbiting the Earth at 18,000 miles per hour. For most of the century, space travel had been the subject of serious study and a staple for science fiction and fantasy. But now what was traveling above was the real thing. Sputnik, 1 184lb metal ball launched the day before, launched a new era.
This single event so shook America, that nuclear scientist Edward Teller called it a technological Pearl Harbor. The Russians had their Satellite, the Americans did not. People lamented that: if only the children had been learning more science and mathematics in school, this [[strikethrough]] would never [[/strikethrough]] have happened.
[[strikethrough]] Then [[/strikethrough]] Now, fast forward as they say - to a summer night in July of 1969, when billions of television watchers around the world saw the fuzzy image of a spacesuit descend the ladder until a space boot toughed the moon.
What happened in between those two events is what we celebrate this evening. Not merely the 50th anniversary of one university, in one city, in one country, but rather the accumulated transference of knowledge from one person, from one book, from one computer screen to the open mind of someone eager to learn.
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