Friday dose of Krauthammer:
We had no idea how lucky we were with Sputnik. The subsequent panic turned out to be an enormous boon. The fear of falling behind the Communists induced the federal government to pour a river of money into science and math education. The result was a vast cohort of scientists who gave us not only Apollo and the moon, but the sinews of the information age — for example, ARPA (established just months after Sputnik) created ARPANET, which became the Internet — that have ensured American technological dominance to this day.