Sputnik: The Space Race Begins
The Soviet Union put an eighty-four-kilogram sphere into orbit on 4 October 1957 and it broadcast a beeping tone that anyone with a shortwave radio could hear. Sputnik was a polished aluminium ball 58 centimetres across with four aerials, three silver-zinc batteries and two radio transmitters, and it did nothing except beep and change the temperature of its own interior. That was sufficient. It had been assembled quickly as a substitute for a heavier scientific satellite that was running late, and it was launched on an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile — which is the part that mattered in Washington, since a rocket that can put a satellite over the United States can put a warhead there. The American reaction was disproportionate and productive. The Vanguard launch attempt in December exploded on the pad on television and was called Flopnik by the newspapers; Explorer 1 succeeded in January 1958 and discovered the Van Allen belts; NASA was created in July; and the National Defense Education Act poured federal money into science, mathematics and language teaching. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in February 1958 and eventually built the network that became the internet. Sputnik itself decayed and burned up in January 1958 after three months and some 1,400 orbits. Korolev, the chief designer who built it and who had spent six years in the gulag in the 1930s, was never named publicly in his lifetime and was identified only in his obituary in 1966. The word means fellow traveller or companion in Russian, and it was a satellite in the older sense before it was one in the modern sense. Everything currently in orbit descends from a sphere that carried no instruments at all.
- Year: 1957 CE
- Category: Technological
