What was Sputnik?

The simplest satellite

Its working name was Prosteishiy Sputnik, “simplest satellite.” The Soviet scientists’ real satellite, a laboratory full of instruments for the International Geophysical Year, was months behind schedule, and the Americans had announced a satellite of their own. So Sergei Korolev’s design bureau built a stand-in: a pressurized aluminum sphere with batteries and two transmitters, on 20 and 40 megahertz, so that radio amateurs anywhere could pick up the signal.

In Russian, sputnik is the ordinary word for a satellite. It also means “fellow traveler.” The batteries died after 21 days, and on January 4, 1958, three months after launch, the ball fell back into the atmosphere and burned up. The big laboratory flew in May 1958, as Sputnik 3.

Why it frightened Americans

The ball itself was harmless. The rocket was the point. Sputnik rode an R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to carry a hydrogen bomb to the United States in about half an hour. It took off from a secret site on the Kazakh steppe, later called Baikonur. The bright dot that Americans watched cross the evening sky was usually not the satellite, which was barely visible to the naked eye, but the rocket’s empty core stage, 26 meters long, which had reached orbit too.

Five days after the launch, President Eisenhower faced the press. He described the Soviet feat as “one small ball in the air” and played down the satellite:

Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota.

In the same answer he named what did worry him: proof of “a very powerful thrust in their rocketry.” Many Americans were not calmed. A rocket that could put a ball in orbit could put a warhead on any city.

The Sputnik moment

The shock gave English a phrase, the “Sputnik moment”: a jolt that wakes a country up to a rival’s lead. In 1958 Congress passed the National Defense Education Act to pay for science, mathematics and language teaching, and the Pentagon set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In Moscow, by contrast, Pravda first ran the news under a plain headline, “TASS Report.” Front pages around the world did the shouting for it.

A month later Sputnik 2 went up with a passenger, the dog Laika, who never came home; her story is here.

Flopnik, Explorer and NASA

The first American reply came with the cameras watching, and failed. On December 6, 1957, a Navy Vanguard rocket lifted about a meter off its pad at Cape Canaveral, dropped and exploded, and newspapers called it “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik.” On January 31, 1958, an Army team led by Wernher von Braun put Explorer 1 into orbit; it detected the radiation belts that now bear the name of the physicist James Van Allen. On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the law creating a civilian space agency, and NASA opened on October 1, 1958. The race had begun, and Moscow was ahead: who won it in the end depends on what you count.