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His monitor provides images from a sensor placed 11 feet behind a drill bit probing for oil 200 miles offshore.

The "logging while drilling sensor" works in water as deep as 26,000 feet, where the pressure hovers somewhere around 23,000 pounds per square inch 767 times more pressure than a water faucet.

The technology could save Baird's industry billions of dollars a year, he said.

And, like many of the micro-technologies and satellite systems considered common today, the luxury is in large part because of an event that occurred 50 years ago: the Soviet Sputnik satellite launch.

"All that technology grows out of satellites," Baird said from Texas, where he is president of his own petrophysical company. "Prior to the Sputnik launch, we had other things on our mind, but it got us very focused. It could have been serendipity, but I believe Sputnik was a real landmark."

So do plenty of others.

Half a century since the roughly 180-pound satellite rocketed into space, marking the beginning of the Space Age, a NASA employee, a politician who advocates space projects and a leader in the burgeoning commercial space travel industry are working to recreate the sense of excitement for space travel that followed the Sputnik launch.

All three agree: Sputnik's effects on modern life cannot be overestimated.

The NASA scientist

As a kid, Paul Lowman bought every 25-cent copy of Astounding Science Fiction magazine he could find.

The fictional rockets bound for space sometimes displayed on the covers fascinated him, even if they did feel like fantasy.

It took some time, but fable became reality while Lowman was studying geology in graduate school at the University of Colorado.

"Hey, Paul, the Russians just put a 180-pound satellite into space!" Lowman remembers his neighbor yelling, waking him from an afternoon nap.

"Talk about being woken up with a jolt," he said this summer from his office at the Goddard Space Center in Maryland, where he has worked since 1959.

With a pair of glasses that magnified his vision three times, Lowman went out the next several days at sundown and sunrise to try to catch a glimpse of the satellite.

On Day 4, he finally saw something.

It was the carrier rocket that helped get Sputnik into orbit.

"I tell you that was one of the high points of my life," Lowman said. "I was absolutely galvanized to go into science."

Lowman joined NASA on Dec. 8, 1959, a year after the civilian-based space program was created.

Although the United States already had responded to Sputnik by putting its own satellite into space, the country was still in a Cold War-fueled panic over the hunk of metal flying overhead.

It wasn't so much the satellite itself that caused alarm but what it represented: The Soviets' apparent ability to shoot an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States and decimate an entire city.

NASA scientists were given wide leverage and funding to do their work to prevent that from happening, Lowman said.

"We didn't get every dollar we asked for, but darn close to it," said Lowman, who, as a geophysicist during NASA's infancy, worked just down the hall from then-director Harry Goett.

An appetite to achieve was palpable, Lowman said.

President John F. Kennedy's declared goal of making the United States the first country to get to the moon in 1961 only heightened the optimism.

Enthusiasm has waned since Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the lunar surface, Lowman said.

"I don't want to say it's a joke, but it's a pale shadow of what it once was. The enthusiasm just isn't that high. I could say it in stronger words than that, but I don't really want to."

An organization in which scientists once had wide spending capabilities and access to the top echelons of management has become a place where every penny is counted and bureaucracy reigns, Lowman said.

"We have to compete for every dollar we earn, including our salaries," he said.

Lowman said he now spends one-third of his time filling out paperwork, effectively bringing his research to a "screeching halt."

One of only a few scientists left from the beginning of the Space Age, Lowman said he feels like the general public views space exploration as an unnecessary expense.

Opinion polls prove his point.

A 2006 Gallup poll showed one-third of respondents thought funding for NASA should be reduced or ended entirely; 17 percent said it should be increased.

Now close to retirement, Lowman remains optimistic his successors can re-create the momentum associated with the Sputnik era.

"Over the next 50 years, these problems will be overcome," he said.

The politician

Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., spoke recently, while preparing to enter a Colorado brewery that is using solar and wind power, about the impact of Sputnik 50 years after its launch.

The parallel between past and present was a vivid reminder, he said, of developments since the landmark satellite first appeared.

"It produced knowledge beyond just how to make a better computer," said Udall, who chairs the U.S. House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics.

Renewable energy provides just one example, Udall said, of how the Space Age continues to benefit the economy by sparking innovative technology.

Despite its benefits, support for space exploration simply doesn't earn votes like it once did.

Aside from Sen. Hillary Clinton's occasional references to the "Sputnik moment" from her youth when students were compelled to concentrate on math and science, space exploration has received little mention on the 2008 presidential campaign trail.

Iraq and terrorism are today what trips to the moon and satellites were for candidates in the 1950s and 1960s.

"There are just so many other pressing issues," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "You simply don't get elected on your attitude towards space."

Piloted spaceflights monopolized by trips to the International Space Station may garner less public attention, but NASA is still hard at work, Udall said.

The Hubble Telescope makes discoveries almost every day. The International Space Station remains a venue for scientific study, and robotic missions are more important than ever.

"The perception is different than the reality," Udall said of NASA's lower profile in recent years. "We have a broader portfolio than ever, but the competition of the Cold War meant you had a different attention.

"And, of course, there was a real 'gee whiz' factor."

The challenge for Udall and others in charge of advocating for future goals like President Bush's 2004 pledge to return a person to the moon and eventually Mars is convincing others space is a wise investment.

As a product of the Sputnik era, born in 1950 and an observer of the Mercury and Apollo programs, Udall said it's a challenge to recapture the enthusiasm he saw in his youth.

"We're saying the right things, but we have to provide the resources, or we'll end up cutting into the muscle," he said. "We have to make the connection between what NASA does and people's everyday lives."

One example: Climate change, where politicians use data from satellites to understand whether their policies are working.

Another eye-catching event such as Sputnik would help, he said.

The only situation likely to produce such a reaction is the Chinese reaching the moon before the United States does again, he said.

"I'm not sure that we can count on that, though," Udall said. "I think we just have to make the case that this is important stuff. And it is."

The future

Peter Diamandis was born the same year President Kennedy told Americans the United States would win the race to the moon.

As a child, he watched the Apollo missions, amazed at the level of human passion and risk on display.

Now, as a leader in the growing commercial space travel industry, he's the one providing the inspiration.

"As I look at space and what it means, I believe it to be human destiny," said Diamandis, who chairs the Ansari X Prize foundation, which awarded $10 million to the creators of the first privately financed spaceflight in 2004.

The next X Prize, yet to be announced, is likely to push innovators to create a way of exiting sub-orbit and reaching altogether new heights, he said.

Diamandis also is CEO of Zero Gravity, a company that uses a Boeing 727 to propel groups as far as 34,000 feet above earth into weightlessness. But that endeavor is only the beginning, he said.

He thinks humans will evolve irreversibly into space over the next 50 years, and he has made it his personal mission to get them there.

"What I point out to people is that we cannot continue to have a human population expand, who demand and deserve a higher standard of living, with the resources we have on Earth alone," he said. "But the things we fight wars over are in infinite quantities in space."

Diamandis is, like many of his peers in the industry, buoyed by his own enthusiasm and unafraid of the inherent risks of space travel.

Although the U.S. government began the space exploration process, commercial interests, like air travel, will provide the real push in the decades to come, Diamandis said.

Citing the Columbia disaster, he said, NASA has become too risk averse and does not market itself well enough to attract big thinkers.

"We've made space very boring," he said. "I'll ask an audience of 1,000 people who can name an astronaut, and nobody can. We should be ashamed of ourselves for what we've done.

"What we do on every single flight is incredible."

Drew Kerr is a reporter for the Glens Falls, N.Y., Post-Star, a Lee Enterprises sister newspaper of the Pantagraph.