Pearl Harbor Day, the day America woke up

Today is the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into World War II.  Hard to believe that this was nearly a lifetime ago now.  Next year will be the 70th anniversary of the day which shall live in infamy.  Most people alive today weren't even born yet when that fateful day happened.  It was nearly a generation before I was even born.  Yet, now, I am a bit of an old-timer myself.  I've seen a few things during my time.  One of those was the landing on the Moon in 1969.

The book that I am now reading, called "Moon Shot" was about the early days of the American Manned Space Program.  This book is about the early sixties, which was when I was very young.  Being fairly recent to the times, World War II was very fresh in the minds of people back then.  It is amazing, in retrospect, how much the world changed in such as short amount of time.  Rockets, computers, and television sets were all being put into service for the first time.  All against the backdrop of the Cold War, which followed World War. 

Rocketry was new, but not brand new.  Although Hitler used rockets late in the war, the technology was still untested and undeveloped.  America should have had a head start, since most of Germany's scientists came here after the war.  However, as in the case of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, America was caught napping when Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit the Earth.  All this happened just a little more than 15 years after Pearl Harbor.  A few months after Sputnik, Alan Shepherd became the first American in space.  But his was a suborbital flight.  America was again playing catch up in the Space Race.  After Pearl Harbor, America was playing catch up with the Japanese Imperial Fleet.  In order to play catch up with the Russians, America had to develop the technology which eventually would take humans to the Moon and back.

Looking back over history, you can see that history has a tendency to repeat itself.  A new power is rising in the East, China, and they are quite interested in space.  Will America fall asleep again and be caught napping when China pulls off a big first?  China is advancing so fast that it almost seems inevitable.  But this is in keeping with the fast paced, changing world of today.  There really isn't time to sleep these days.  You have to keep your eyes wide open all the time.  You don't get caught napping unless you first fall asleep.  Let's see if history repeats again.