Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union yesterday in a U-2 spy plane. I don’t know why I’m writing about this in a space notebook, but it feels connected.

The U-2 flies at 70,000 feet — nearly 14 miles up. The Air Force has been telling us for years that it’s a weather research aircraft. Everyone with sense suspected this was a cover story; a “weather plane” with that kind of altitude capability and range doesn’t need to fly over Soviet territory. Now it’s confirmed: we were spying on the Soviets from altitudes we thought were beyond the reach of their missiles.

We were wrong about the missiles.

Powers was photographing military installations, apparently. Sverdlovsk, deep inside Russia. His plane was hit by a Soviet SA-2 missile at altitude, and he managed to bail out. He’s alive and in Soviet custody, which is the worst possible outcome from an intelligence standpoint — alive means he can talk, and the Soviets are going to make the maximum propaganda use of this.

Khrushchev is furious. The Paris summit that was supposed to ease Cold War tensions is now in shambles. Eisenhower had to admit we were lying — not just about this flight but about a whole program of espionage flights that have been running for four years.

Here’s what connects this to the space notebook: the reason we need reconnaissance aircraft flying at 70,000 feet is that we cannot yet do what we actually want to do, which is reconnaissance from orbit. A satellite passing over the Soviet Union can’t be shot down. It records everything below it. And unlike a pilot, it doesn’t have information the Soviets can extract.

The whole space program has this military subtext running under the science and the exploration. The rockets we’re developing for Mercury are the same rockets — in modified form — that would carry nuclear warheads. The satellites we’re launching for science are cousin to the spy satellites already in development. And the human spaceflight program is partly about proving we have the rocket technology to put things anywhere we want.

I don’t like thinking of Alan Shepard’s capsule as a cousin to an ICBM. But it’s the same physics.

Powers is a prisoner in Moscow right now. He’ll probably be traded for someone eventually — that’s how these things work. Meanwhile Khrushchev is beating his chest at the UN, and the Paris summit is dead, and the Cold War, which had been running a few degrees warmer lately, has snapped back to its default temperature of barely-controlled mutual hostility.

We’re in a race with these people. Not just for the prestige of being first to space. For actual survival. For whether the American way of life survives the next fifty years. The rockets are not metaphors.

I need to remember that, when I get excited about the science and the adventure of it all. The context is that two great powers are pointing nuclear weapons at each other and the space program is a way of proving — to the Soviets and to ourselves and to every neutral country watching — that our system works better than theirs.

The stakes are very high and a man named Francis Gary Powers is sitting in a Soviet prison to prove it.