March 2017
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 29m
English
In 1961, US president John F. Kennedy stood before a joint meeting of Congress. The young president had a job to do. Sixteen years after the end of World War II and eight years after the cessation of hostilities in the Korean War, the country was teetering between optimism (from dominating the global economy) and despair (from falling behind in the critical space race with the Russians). Few people doubted the country’s technological prowess. After all, the Manhattan project had famously developed a nuclear weapon in a shockingly short period of time. The world was beginning to see the changes that stemmed from Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor in 1947. But it was the Russians who had sent the first satellite into ...