Sputnik 1
Photo Source: NASA

The traveling companion was something that shook the world to it's very foundations, in it's day. You see this is the meaning of the Russian word Sputnik. Sputnik was the first satellite ever to be put in orbit around the Earth, or anywhere else for that matter and it scared the entire world, and prompted the space race that ended with the U.S. landing on the Moon.

The year was 1957 and Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4. I remember thinking that now the game was over and that the Russians could drop bombs on us anytime they wanted to from space. What I did realize at the time, was that the satellite was only the size of a basketball and posed no danger to anyone. But we didn't think this way during the cold war. Every advance the Soviet Union made was considered a threat to our way of life and maybe even to our lives themselves. Strangely enough, this event didn't get much coverage in the Soviet newspapers at the time. The Soviets just didn't realize what an impact it would have on the world. They found out soon enough however, and the next day all their papers were full of Sputnik articles.

To give you an idea of the difference between the Sputnik articles in the Soviet Union for October 5, then October 6, here is a comparison. On October 5,1957 a small article entitled "Tass Report" was on the bottom of the front page on Pravda. It contained a few paragraphs of cold scientific data such as orbital info and statistics, but the next day when the country realized what a stir they had created in the world community, the paper ran a huge story entitled "World's First Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Nation". Well I guess you couldn't blame them, they had accomplished quite a feat at the time. They even created poems about it. Two were entitled "Leap into the Future" and "Scouting the Celestial Deep".

Sputnik Mounted In Rocket
Photo Source: NASA

Back in the U.S. we were kicking ourselves. This was the home of Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry. Even the German V2 rocket was based upon his work. We had been talking about putting a satellite in orbit since the late 1940s but never got around to it. You know how it is, it's like fixing that leaky faucet. You talk about it over and over, but you just never do anything about it, until it begins to really run. Well that is exactly what happened to us. All of a sudden we realized that we weren't first in space and that we now had much catching up to do. It was not a happy time for America. We felt like someone had kicked us in the teeth. There is one thing you can bet on about this country, we hate being second in anything.

What we never paid any attention to at the time was the fact that the Soviets had their own Robert Goddard and his name was Kanstantin Tsiolkovsky. Unfortunately for us, the Soviets paid much more attention to their rocket program than we did to ours. In the beginning we were ahead. Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid fuel rocket from his aunt's farm on March 16, 1926. This event basically went unnoticed. Before this event, all rockets were powered by gun powder. If it wasn't for the fact that liquid fuel replaced gunpowder, we would have never got to the moon or any of the planets. On March 28, 1935 Goddard scored another important first. He launched the first rocket that contained gyroscopic controls. He was also the first to use moveable deflector vanes, fuel pumps for liquid rocket fuel, and parachutes that automatically opened to glide the spent rockets or it's cargo back down to an easy landing.

While we weren't paying much attention to this, the Germans were. They couldn't get over the idea that we weren't putting Goddard's discoveries to practical use. The famous V2 rocket was developed using some of Goddard's ideas and plans. Of course we all know that the Soviets and ourselves captured many of these rockets at the end of World War II. While the Soviets improved them rapidly, we proceeded at a more leisurely pace. This was to be our downfall.

Even before Goddard became known, Tsiolkovsky demonstrated in 1903 that launching a satellite was practical. He again presented his case in 1948 to the famous Korolev in the Soviet Union. At first there was no support for the idea. Five years later this changed when a new rocket capable of carrying a heavier payload was developed, it was the R-7 ICBM.

R-7 ICBM Launch
Photo Source: U.S. Department of Energy