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Gregory McNamee: Sputnik ... A Somber Anniversary

[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. He is also literary critic for the Hollywood Reporter and a regular contributor to many other publications.]

Half a century ago, the Cold War raging, scientists on all sides of the world were working diligently on new, improved, and better ways to kill from afar. America had Wernher von Braun, on permanent loan from the Third Reich, and those stalwarts of the Manhattan Project who had survived McCarthyism. In Britain and France, German and homegrown scientists labored to enroll their countries in the nuclear club; in China, India, and even places as far from the Eurasian theater as Argentina, scientists and engineers did the same, all with an eye to converting nuclear have-nots into nuclear haves.

Deep within the Soviet Union, an aerospace engineer named Sergey Korolyov had been working on developing the giant R-7 rocket, a device to deliver military payloads to targets far away. Having already spent time in the Gulag and aware that colleagues had been executed for not delivering as ordered, Korolyov was understandably worried when the first few R-7 tests failed. “Things are very, very bad,” he wrote to his wife from his testing ground in the desert of Kazakhstan, and he prepared for the worst. Yet, a few days later, an R-7 traveled 4,000 miles, landing in the Pacific Ocean off the Kamchatka Peninsula just where it was supposed to, and a relieved Korolyov was off the hook.

Following a second successful test on September 7, 1957, Korolyov was summoned to Moscow, where a delighted Nikita Khrushchev promised to increase his budget. Seizing the moment, Korolyov suggested that an R-7 be used to put a satellite into orbit around Earth. The Soviet leader concurred, and less than a month later, on October 4, that satellite, Sputnik, was lifted up into the outer atmosphere. “Artificial earth satellites will pave the way to interplanetary travel,” Pravda exulted, “and our contemporaries will witness how the free and conscientious labor of the people of the new socialist society makes the most daring dreams of mankind a reality.”

Washington was not pleased. Neither was the American media, which began bandying terms like “missile gap” and “space race” about. Lyndon Johnson was certain that the success of Sputnik would put a Democrat in office in 1961, and he was right. Dwight Eisenhower, who had just suffered a stroke, seemed slow to respond to the satellite launch, but the fact was that he felt sure that the Soviet Union did not have the wherewithal to fund a space race for long. In the end, he was right as well.

Even so, the Eisenhower administration poured money into the space program–and, what’s more, into scientific education, giving American public schools a much-needed boost and launching hundreds of thousands of scientific careers. An American satellite, Explorer I, went into space on January 31, 1958, two more satellites went up in March, and more followed. The result of the American effort would be fully felt a dozen years after Sputnik went up, when American astronauts planted the Stars and Stripes on the moon.

Things could have turned out much worse. On this 50th anniversary of Sputnik, it’s worth a note of thanks that the rockets that went up did not come down raining death on the world. May the space quest of the future have the same result.

Related Links

  • Slate: Sputnik photo essay

  • NYT: Special section on Sputnik
  • Read entire article at Britannica Blog