Sputnik

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SPUTNIK.

Sputnik, or satellite, after the Russian word for "companion in travel" or "satellite," is the name of the world's first artificial satellite. Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, awed the world, ushered the space age, and had global political repercussions.

The team of Soviet engineers behind Sputnik included the chief designer, Sergei Korolyov (1907–1966), and the rocket engine specialist Valentin Glushko (1908–1989). Their work on rocketry started in the 1920s, inspired by writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a visionary of space travel, science fiction author, and amateur inventor, many of whose ideas, including Sputnik, they later managed to realize. After a short honeymoon around 1930 with revolutionary utopian projects, rocket engineers were forced by the hard realities of Soviet history—the looming war threat from Nazi Germany and Stalinist purges—to switch to more useful and down-to-earth designs with short-range missiles and aircraft. Meanwhile, in Germany, the military pursued a much more ambitious project headed by Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) and Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), which by the end of World War II developed a long-range guided missile, A-4 (better known as V-2). Although at that stage of development still a failure as a military weapon, V-2 constituted a great engineering breakthrough and, after the Nazi defeat, inspired subsequent missile projects in the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom.

The best of the "war bounty"—the core of the German missile team (along with most of the surviving V-2s)—was brought to the United States in Operation Paperclip to work on ballistic missiles for the Department of Defense. Having acquired much less, the Soviet military relied mostly on its own engineers, who were first gathered in occupied Germany to study the remaining equipment and documentation and in 1946 moved to a secret research center, NII-88, in Kaliningrad near Moscow. Despite an initial disadvantage, the Soviet team eventually surpassed its German-American rivals in developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The Soviet project's chief military motivations were rooted in the asymmetrical strategic balance. American bombers from air bases in Europe and Asia could target cities deep inside the Soviet territory, while the Soviet Union lacked forward bases from which aircraft could reach American shores. Without ICBMs, atomic bombs alone did not provide deterrence against the American nuclear threat. In an attempt to accelerate the development of a delivery system, Soviet officials set their target payload in 1953, before they actually knew the exact mass of the hydrogen bomb, on the basis of a higher estimate of three tons. The assignment led Korolyov's team to leapfrog several incremental stages and develop the powerful two-stage missile R-7 with a seven-thousand-kilometer reach.

Some of the engineers still remembered their youthful dreams about space travel, and Mikhail Tikhonravov's (1901–1974) small group started working on parallel designs for sputniks and manned space missions. In 1956, having impressed the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with the progress of work on R-7, Korolyov obtained permission to use one of the future missiles for a sputnik launch, on the condition that the all-important military assignment would not be deterred. Information about the first successful test of R-7 in August 1957 and a few predictions of imminent space launches appeared in the Soviet press. Concerned about possible U.S. competitors, Korolyov decided to go ahead with a simple sputnik—an 83.6 kilogram aluminum sphere, 58 centimeters in diameter, with a radio transmitter and four antennas—without waiting for more sophisticated equipment. Launched in the early morning of 4 October from the Baykonur site in Kazakhstan, Sputnik orbited Earth every ninety-eight minutes for the next three months at the altitude of 230 to 940 kilometers. It could be seen from ground with the naked eye, and its beeping signal was heard by radio amateurs around the world. Overnight it became a public sensation and world media fixation.

Only after the fact did authorities in the Soviet Union and the United States understand the full political and symbolic importance of Sputnik. Soviet propaganda quickly started promoting the achievement nationally and internationally as the demonstration of socialism's superiority over capitalism. The U.S. leadership initially tried to downplay Sputnik's importance but also worried about the changed dynamics in Cold War technological competition: in 1945 the Soviets had been viewed as backward, but they had "caught up" in the development of the atomic bomb, then had come even with thermonuclear weapons and had actually surpassed the Americans in missile design. After Sputnik, the idea of space travel captivated the minds of millions and became a chief political priority for existing and aspiring superpowers. The space race began in earnest.

Khrushchev asked Korolyov for further spectacular achievements pegged to two major forthcoming Soviet holidays, 7 November 1957 and 1 May 1958. Sputnik 2 (508 kilograms), carrying the dog Layka, followed on 3 November 1957. The United States, having earlier announced its plans to launch satellites during the International Geophysical Year 1957–1958, tried hastily to catch up, which resulted in a public embarrassment with Vanguard ("Flopnik") on 6 December 1957 and eventual success with Explorer 1 (14 kilograms) on 31 January 1958, lifted up by von Braun's Jupiter missile. The Soviet Sputnik 3, delayed until 15 May 1958 by a launching failure, weighed 1.3 tons and contained an array of scientific instruments. Subsequent Soviet probes in the Sputnik and Luna series brought further achievements, including recovering dogs alive from space, circumnavigating the moon, and for the first time photographing its far side. But the ultimate prize was claimed on 12 April 1961, when a modified three-stage version of R-7 carried the capsule Vostok 1 with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968), who orbited the earth once and landed safely after the 108-minute flight. In the Soviet Union and also in present-day Russia, the victory of the first manned flight was valued higher than any other human achievement in space, including Sputnik, and celebrated annually as Cosmonautics Day. In the United States, the defeat in the space race led President John F. Kennedy to proclaim sending man to the moon as the nation's major goal. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had been created in 1958 as a response to Sputnik by the National Aeronautics and Space Act to provide a U.S. space program with centralized government management in the way the Soviets were thought to have their work organized. Granted national priority and unrestricted funds, NASA accomplished its main task on 20 July 1969 with the successful moon landing of Apollo 11. Other countries followed with their own satellites: United Kingdom and Canada (1962), Italy (1964), France (1965), Australia (1967), Germany (1969), and Japan and China (1970). A collaborative European Space Research Organization (ESRO) was established in 1964, which launched its first satellite in 1968.

Sputnik's aftereffects spread far beyond space policy, although they remain considerably under-studied. The technological achievement proved its practical usefulness almost immediately, with spy, meteorological, and communications satellites. Whereas manned space missions remained important as propaganda but of little economic benefit, without sputniks, modern global economy and communications would have been unimaginable. Like the atomic bomb twelve years earlier, Sputnik influenced major changes in general science and technology policy. In the United States, overall spending on research and development jumped to a new high, and government funding agencies adopted the originally Marxist approach of not making a sharp distinction between pure and applied research. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 was intended to increase government involvement in mathematics and science education in order to catch up with the Soviets in the mass training of engineers and scientists. It proved easier, however, to import qualified personnel from abroad. Changes in U.S. immigration laws toward preferential acceptance of professional and technical workers with degrees led in the 1960s to the serious problem of brain drain, first for Western Europe and later for many third world countries, but the same process made American science multiracial, diverse, and less American.

For the Soviet Union, Sputnik was a propaganda and diplomatic coup that changed the country's international image to that of a technologically advanced superpower roughly equal to the United States and increased the attractiveness of the Soviet model, especially in the developing world. From a military perspective, as the visible tip of the ICBM program, Sputnik signified the start of a more symmetrical stage in the Cold War, in which both opposing alliances possessed efficient deterrence against the other. The transition was hard to swallow for the United States, producing the dangerous Cuban missile crisis of 1962, but eventually resulted in a more stable state of growing mutual awareness that a thermonuclear war could not be won in principle. Indeed, Khrushchev's acquaintance with the progress of nuclear and missile development was a major factor in his proclamation of "peaceful coexistence" as the official Soviet strategy in 1956. Soviet leaders felt they needed real nuclear parity—catching up with the United States in the actual numbers of missiles and warheads rather than in the militarily and economically useless moon race—which became their first priority in the post-Sputnik period and was accomplished during the rest of the 1960s. It also can be argued that their pride in the space victory and the effects of their own bombastic propaganda contributed to the dominance of a self-congratulatory mood among Soviet leaders in later years, which made them less competitive and less willing to strive for changes. At least chronologically, Sputnik and Gagarin coincided with the acme of Soviet civilization, before it entered stagnation and decline. They thus remain in public perception the symbols of its greatest accomplishments and contributions to world culture.

See alsoCold War; Gagarin, Yuri; Space Programs.