Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.
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The new science books started to flow into the schools when I was still in grammar school. By the time I got to high school in the middle 1960s and took physics, my text was the state-of-the-art PSSC book. It was eye-popping. There was also a rival series of texts pouring out of Berkeley. The saber-rattling was a dismaying element of the Space Age, but the impact on the math and science classrooms turned school into a garden of earthly delights for kids like me. I guess I owe a lot to those Sputnik-launching commies...