Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, weighed only 184 pounds and at about 23 inches wide was about the size of a beach ball, but 45 years ago Friday, on Oct. 4, 1957, it changed the course of history by ushering in the Space Age.
The satellite, whose name in Russian means, literally, satellite, was followed by fleets of satellites, robots to the planets, humans in orbit and eventually footsteps on the moon. The peaceful competition between the Soviet Union and the United States fostered by Sputnik continues today, with mature space industries in both countries continually creating advanced technology, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in income.
The tiny sphere blasted into low Earth orbit atop a Soviet ballistic missile from the country's secret Baikonur Soviet launch site in central Asia. The feat was one of the U.S.S.R.'s offerings to the International Geophysical Year, an effort of global scientific research that began in July 1957 and actually ran 18 months, to December 1958. But the fact that the first orbiting spacecraft was launched by the Soviet Union and not the United States stunned the world.
"Sputnik represented the first instance where man was able to move beyond the atmosphere in any serious way and stay up there," said Roger Launius, former head of NASA's History Office and a space historian at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The development of a space satellite was high on the agendas of the governments of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s because of the possible military implications. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had announced U.S. plans to orbit a satellite sometime during the IGY. Likewise, during the summer of 1957 the Soviet government also announced plans to loft a spacecraft, even releasing the radio frequency that the tiny craft would transmit.
Few in the West took the Soviet boast seriously, however. "It should not have really shocked anybody, but what it did send a signal to the public. For the first time in our history our two great oceans could not protect us," Launius recalled.
When Sputnik's launched was revealed, the public outcry that the U.S. had been beaten into space spilled into Congressional hearings and fueled political debates. Then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson held hours of public testimony seeking to blame Republicans and the Eisenhower administration for not giving space a high enough priority. He warned the Russians had reached the "high ground" of space and someday might be able to rain down nuclear bombs on America.
As a result, the Eisenhower administration accelerated its space and missile programs. The first U.S. response to Sputnik, however, was another embarrassment. Some eight weeks after the Soviet craft was launched, on Dec. 6, 1957, America made its first attempt at orbiting a satellite -- the Navy's Vanguard 1.
Live nationwide television broadcasts showed the rocket's blastoff -- and its explosion seconds later in a dramatic failure. The United States would not succeed in launching a satellite until Jan. 31, 1958. But by then, a global competition between the two super space powers was in full development.
The Soviets would score another first on April 12, 1961 by launching Yuri Gagarin into orbit as the first man in space and continued a string of achievements, with America playing catch-up for several more years. Eventually the U.S. space program would achieve the first space rendezvous, the first successful Mars probes and, on July 20, 1969, would win the race to land the first humans on the moon.
Today, the Russian government is a U.S. partner aboard the International Space Station. Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin sell Russian space boosters on the commercial market. An evolved version of the rocket that lofted Sputnik is also for sale-by a Russian and French commercial rocket consortium. The space "race" continues, but this time, for commercial profits and jobs, not international political prestige.
"Sputnik ushered in the effort to use the basic sciences to push the basic technologies for our national economy," said Charles Vick, a Space Policy analyst in Washington.
"The criticality of the basic sciences to push the development of technology as U.S. government policy is the greatest legacy of Sputnik today," he adds.
