I can still remember the Life magazine cover. Fifty years ago, on June 3, 1965, Edward White walked in space. Two weeks later — time ran differently back then — the brightly colored image of the U.S. astronaut bobbing above a sea-blue Earth was in every living room.

True, a Soviet cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, had accomplished the same feat 2½ months earlier. But the celebration of White's achievement involved more than jingoism. The photographs of the American dangling in space left us breathless with wonder. Before considering why that awe was important, let's take a moment and consider what the era was like.

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, people were afraid that the United States had lost its edge. In the popular imagination, the Soviet missile scientists — like the Soviet chess players, ballerinas and Olympic athletes — were leaving the world in the dust. Tom Wolfe, in "The Right Stuff," memorably captures the fundamental belief that led the U.S. to its wild celebration of the courage of its early astronauts: "Our rockets always blow up."