Last week this newspaper published a photograph of an astronaut on the International Space Station shaking hands with Robonaut, in what was dubbed "the first handshake ever between a human and a humanoid in space."

Wow! I didn't even know we still had people on the Space Station, let alone Gort.

Face it! Space travel doesn't wow us anymore, which is ironic considering how 50 years ago Monday the entire world watched the flight of John Glenn.

Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth, although not the first human to do so. That was a Russian named Yuri Gagarin, seeing how Russia was then kicking our galactic butts.

The space race essentially began in 1957, while Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. We obsessed about Ike, praying he'd stay healthy lest his weaselly vice president, Richard M. Nixon, take over.

Fearing Nixon, we forgot about the "Godless commies" until they suddenly launched a metal basketball into space.

That was Sputnik, and we Americans took the shocking news with our normal air of over-reaction. John Reinhart of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory warned, "No matter what we do now, the Russians will beat us to the moon. … I would not be surprised if the Russians reached the moon within a week."

They didn't, of course. But they did launch Sputnik II, which carried a small dog on a one-way trip, making her outer space's first roadkill.

Before you could say borscht, the Russkies were sending people heavenward.

Naturally, we were launching our own rockets, some of which reached altitudes of 28 feet before exploding in flames. (This was NASA's famous Oops Program.)

Luckily, we soon got it right.

On May 5, 1961, we fifth-graders at Ephrata's Fulton Street Elementary School, led by our teacher with the confusing name Marion Merrion, carried our chairs to the school's all-purpose room. The occasion was the launching into space of America's first astronaut, Alan Shepard.

The entire school of 100-plus kids crowded around the school's 24-inch black-and-white TV to witness this historic event. We also were going to miss some classes, so it was an all-around good day.

On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn was launched into space, and we were back in the all-purpose room, now sixth-graders under Frances Hoover (who pronounced Washington "Warsh-ington," for which, of course, we, her loving students, mimicked whenever she was out of earshot).

Squinting at the small screen, we were mesmerized by the launch. So were our teachers, who, by our calculations, were old enough to have recalled early balloon flights during the Civil War.

We didn't watch the entire five hours of Glenn's flight; that would've taken away too much time from our studies and, more importantly, from our recess. But we did file into the all-purpose room that afternoon to watch Glenn splashdown.

Over at Ephrata High School, the flight was broadcast through the public address system. We elementary kids got to watch it happen.

It was a simpler world back then. Gas cost 31 cents a gallon, a first class stamp was just 4 cents, there were very few color TVs and no cable, and only Buck Rogers had anything resembling the Internet.

But at least I knew who was in outer space.

lalexander@lnpnews.com