PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- In December 1957 I was a private first-class in the U.S. Army stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. We had a Russian kid in our unit, and when we weren't on guard duty or peeling potatoes, he would translate programs for us from Radio Moscow.

Right before Christmas, we heard a narrator telling a story to some children. He said, "Aloysha, look up in the sky. There are three moons, and two of them are Russian."

We were in the Space Age! The Russians had just put up their first sputniks, pre-empting the Americans much to their acute dismay. The Americans, not to be outdone, launched their own satellites early in 1958. Though they were not as large or impressive as the Russians', the space race had begun.

In May 1958, released from the Army and having passed all my exams and my security check, I entered the U.S. Foreign Service to begin my career as a diplomat. My first assignment was with the U.N. Political Office of the State Department in Washington. The subject of my assignment: the international control of outer space.

It was an exciting time. The United States and the Soviet Union had just begun to explore this new world, which began where satellites could orbit around the Earth and then extended to the farthest reaches of the universe. It was a time that could be compared to another era, when an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, discovered that our planet was not flat, but across its oceans existed a new world.