50 Years Ago, Sputnik Was an Improvised Triumph 252
caffiend666 sends in an AP article featuring interviews with the old men who launched the first satellite 50 year ago. The story they tell hinges on luck and the drive of one man, Sergei Korolyov, who died in 1966, unheralded in his lifetime. "When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West... 'At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done,' Chertok recalled. 'We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok'... And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket."
Sounds of Sputnik (Score:5, Informative)
See http://www.amsat.org/amsat/features/sounds/firstsat.html [amsat.org]
This page has the two recordings both in
Red Moon Rising - BBC Radio4 (Score:5, Informative)
Available on Listen Again each day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml [bbc.co.uk]
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, R-7 and its successors have become the most successful launch systems so far.
One of the best recountings of the story and times (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.prometheus-music.com/audio/surprise.mp3 [prometheus-music.com]
written by Leslie Fish
Performed by Gunnar Madsen
published by Prometheus Music http://www.prometheus-music.com/ [prometheus-music.com]
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:3, Informative)
Please look again:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Space-Race-Apollo/dp/0813026288 [amazon.com]
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:5, Informative)
My point expressed in GP still holds.
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:5, Informative)
BBC Space Race (Score:3, Informative)
12 years, not 22 years (Score:3, Informative)
22 years! What?
I guess TFA meant 12 years.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Informative)
You mean, to the government? After all it was one state sponsored program against another. The US program had the advantage of the wealth generated by an efficient economy though.
Re:first mutt in space .. (Score:3, Informative)
There was no mention at the time of Laika dying in orbit, indeed the impression given was thet he safely returned to earth. Later on they mentioned him dying during reentry or euthanized [tedstrong.com] by injection in orbit, or died of fright [dogsinthenews.com] just after take-off, later on in a book written by one of the Russians who actually worked on the project there is mention of the mutt being electrocuted.
Re:first mutt in space .. (Score:2, Informative)
its temp was about 38C which was 'normal', and then they concluded they
needed not only to sustain air temp but provide a ventilator for air flow...
something like that...
"The world" (Score:3, Informative)
> orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often
> need reminding, America is not the entire world.
My parents have told me they "gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension", and they are not Americans.
Re:an extraordinary claim! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We don't have progress. (Score:3, Informative)
Saying that "science has reached it's limit" today is just as foolish as saying it in 1907 or 1807 would have been (and people did). It can be hard for a non-scientist to understand what current research consists of, and it can be even harder for a non-scientist to guess at what of current research will directly result in visible applications, but that doesn't mean that science has stopped - just that you can't see it move.
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:1, Informative)
Before the Fisher, NASA used grease pens because graphite tends to flake away, and in freefall, the graphite becomes a dirty cloud in the air (think black lung). The Russians didn't use pencils either, for the same reason.
Re:Other Notable Achievements (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:3, Informative)
Are you kidding? Switching to Linux is '92 or so streamlined my downloading of images of boobs and provided me with uudecode and xv to see them. (Multiple command lines in X windows, sharing a dialup connection with SLIP, each downloading parts of a series of images so they could be re-assembled -- astonishing technology at the time.)
I'm utterly certain that Linux and Boobs have been in the same sentence before.
Cheers