The sound was almost insultingly simple: beep... beep... beep. On the night of 4 October 1957, radio operators around the world tuned their sets to 20 and 40 megahertz and heard the signal of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, passing overhead every 96 minutes or so. Anyone with a shortwave receiver could listen in — the Soviets had chosen the frequencies partly so that amateurs could verify the achievement for themselves. The satellite was a polished metal sphere just 58 centimetres across, weighing 83.6 kilograms, trailing four whip antennas. It measured almost nothing and did almost nothing. It only had to exist, and to be Soviet.
In the United States, the reaction bordered on panic. Americans had assumed, comfortably, that they led the world in technology; now a communist rival had reached space first, and the rocket that put Sputnik there — the R-7, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile — could evidently deliver a warhead to American soil. Newspapers spoke of a "technological Pearl Harbor". President Eisenhower publicly played it down, noting accurately that the little sphere itself threatened no one, but Senate hearings led by Lyndon Johnson stoked the alarm, and the phrase "Sputnik moment" entered the language permanently. Even slang was infected: the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word "beatnik" in 1958, with Sputnik ringing in his ears.
Both superpowers had promised satellites for the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58, so the launch was not, strictly, a surprise. The shock was the order of finish. The man responsible on the Soviet side was officially a state secret: Sergei Korolev, referred to in public only as the "Chief Designer", a brilliant engineer who had survived arrest and the Gulag during Stalin's purges before rising to run the missile programme. His identity was revealed to the world only after his death in 1966. He never received the Nobel Prize some thought he deserved, precisely because the Soviet state refused to name him.
Dogs, Flopniks and radiation belts
Khrushchev, delighted by the propaganda windfall, demanded an encore within a month. On 3 November 1957, Sputnik 2 carried the first living creature to orbit the Earth: Laika, a small stray dog scooped from the Moscow streets. There was never a plan to bring her home — the technology to survive re-entry did not yet exist — and while Soviet accounts long claimed she survived several days, it was revealed decades later that she died within hours of launch, from overheating.
America's answer, rushed to the pad in December 1957 before live television cameras, was the Vanguard TV-3 rocket. It rose about four feet, lost thrust, and collapsed in a fireball, its little satellite thrown clear and beeping forlornly on the ground. The press coined merciless names: "Flopnik", "Kaputnik". Redemption came from Wernher von Braun's Army team, which on 31 January 1958 launched Explorer 1 — America's first satellite, and pointedly a scientific triumph: its instrument, built under physicist James Van Allen, discovered the belts of trapped radiation girdling the Earth that now bear Van Allen's name. Sputnik had merely beeped; Explorer 1 made the space age's first great discovery.
The race takes shape
The deeper American response was institutional, and it reshaped the modern world. In 1958 Congress created NASA, which absorbed the old aeronautics agency NACA and opened for business that October. The Pentagon founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA — whose later funding of computer networking produced the ARPANET, direct ancestor of the internet. The National Defense Education Act poured money into science and mathematics teaching, on the logic that the race would ultimately be won in classrooms.
For years, though, the Soviets kept scoring firsts: the first probe to strike the Moon and the first photographs of its far side in 1959, and then the biggest prize short of the Moon itself — on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth aboard Vostok 1, the first human in space, in a flight lasting 108 minutes from launch to landing. Weeks later, with America still smarting, President Kennedy stood before Congress on 25 May 1961 and committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out — a goal chosen, in part, because it was far enough away to reset the scoreboard. Eight years later, on 20 July 1969, Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins orbited above, and the race that began with a beeping sphere reached its finish line. Sputnik itself had long since gone: its batteries died after three weeks, and in January 1958 it burned up in the atmosphere — 'sputnik', appropriately for a machine that changed history simply by circling it, being Russian for 'fellow traveller'.
Quiz nuggets
- Sputnik 1, launched 4 October 1957, was a 58 cm sphere weighing 83.6 kg that orbited Earth roughly every 96 minutes.
- The word 'sputnik' is Russian for 'fellow traveller' — and inspired the coining of 'beatnik' in 1958.
- Laika, aboard Sputnik 2, was the first animal to orbit Earth; she died of overheating within hours.
- America's first satellite, Explorer 1 (January 1958), discovered the Van Allen radiation belts.
- Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev's identity was a state secret, revealed only after his death in 1966.