As his eyes penetrated the darkness, a point of light streaked across the sky.  He followed it with his eyes until it disappeared over the horizon.  All at once several more streaks of light flashed past him and they followed the last streak, until they too vanished into the night.  The time it took for each streak of light to appear and then disappear was measured in fractions of a second.  He stood there in utter silence as he drank in the splendor of the night sky that glittered and twinkled from horizon to horizon.   It was hard for him to believe that so much more existed out there than existed on this mere tiny spec of a planet upon which was the platform for this of points-of-light display.  As he contemplated the darkness, a tiny spec of moving light appeared on the East horizon with a path from East to West.  It moved in a steady pace across the sky, much slower than the meteorites he had just witnessed.  He didn’t know it at the time, but he had just observed the first man-made satellite to join the star-studded night, The Soviet Union’s “Sputnik”.  Homer stood in awe of what he saw.  He vowed, right then and there, that he wanted to make rockets.

But alas, the deck was stacked against Homer.