My defining moment at Columbia involves neither my arrival on campus nor meeting a Barnard co-ed. In fact, I was not even on campus when it started, but home eating dinner when a reporter on the radio said the Soviet Union claimed to have placed something they called a Sputnik in space.

I put down my fork and rushed back to campus, where the ham station, W2AEE, was (as we learned later) the second radio station in the United States to record the beep beep signal of Sputnik 1. Several from WKCR then took the tape to WKCR and repeatedly rebroadcast.

The next morning, two FBI agents came in and stole the tape. I made myself very unpopular with WKCR's president by telling him just what I thought of him for letting them walk off with the tape.

But I was taking introductory astronomy with Prof. Schilt at the time, and in our next class he walked into the Pupin classroom saying, "Well, gentlemen, it is not every day I can talk about something new in the sky." He then devoted the entire class period to explaining and demonstrating how Sputnik had been deliberately placed into an orbit where it would not be visible in the United States for as long as possible.

Of course, my entire working career -- on the Apollo Project, teaching astronomy and doing planetarium shows -- was heavily influenced by these events.