I was only eight when Sputnik was launched, and at that age the boundary between science and fiction is pretty blurry. Whichever way the process ran, I've been a fan of science and SF ever since.
It's like when we get the transformer movies. It was all a bunch of smaller robot pieces and then you're on set, and you're watching them blow everything up and you see the movie and you say "wow there's a big giant spaceship crashes there and it turns into a transformer. " It's stuff that you don't really see, because our involvement is so heavy.