50 Years Ago, Sputnik Was an Improvised Triumph

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."

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

[mahmud]

When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor.

Isn't this one of the main tenets of Hacker Philosophy - to play around with technology and see where that gets you?

Ha!

[ChePibe]

Yes, yes, I know!

I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due. The Russians did a great deal to bring us to where we are today in terms of space exploration. One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.

I mean, just think about it - these guys put an object in orbit. It's common place today, I know, but to think that they were able to get it to work the first time still amazes me.

Excellent work, comrades. Excellent work!

Re:Ha!

[Arancaytar]

One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another.

"I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

(This comment is intended to substitute for a +1 Insightful.)

Re:The effects....

[servognome]

And then America got their ass in gear and realized that science is important and started a program that vastly improved science education and learning science became the "cool" thing to do.

It wasn't about cool, it was about patriotism and fear. If communism was "superior" then other countries might adopt it; not to mention the strategic benefits of putting stuff in space like cameras, nuclear weapons, etc.

Re:Ha!

[bentcd]

One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.

Events like this tend to be glorified over time. The good parts get remembered and the bad parts get forgotten or dismissed as "the spirit of the times" or "we shouldn't judge their actions by modern standards" etc. So long as communism remains a non-threat (and thus there is no political necessity to vilify it) I think any bribes will be soundly forgotten 2,000 years from now :-)

The real space junk is the myths.

[Anonymous Coward]

First, "the world" did not "gaze at the heavens in awe and apprehension" as Sputnik orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often need reminding, America is not the entire world.

Second, in the 1950s everyone was shitting themselves over the prospect of a global thermonuclear holocaust, and so the whole space race was the transformation of rocket science from a cool but fairly arcane and quiet field of science into some sort of overhyped modern day mythic single combat, with astronauts painted as knights in white armor championing and defending their tribes, doing some sort of weird imaginary battle in the skies. It wasted a lot of tax money that could have been better spent on American schools and hospitals and Russian food and clothing, and did pretty much nothing towards overthrowing the tyranny of Stalin, who killed many more of his own citizens than Hitler, or making the governments of the US and USSR understand that the other side were in fact humans and not demons or animals.

It did get a whole hell of a lot of astronauts laid like you wouldn't believe, though. I strongly recommend reading Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," even if you have forgotten how to read an entire book, because it's an easy read and very well worth it. I especially love the section where he describes how Chuck Yeager pretty much ascended bodily to Pilot Heaven when he became the first person to break the sound barrier during level flight on October 14, 1947, years before the space race was even so much as a bad dream.

Finally, the USSR had the early lead in unmanned flight but the US eventually won in manned flight, so you could say that in Soviet Russia, people launched rockets to the moon, but in the United States, rockets launched YOU!

Re:We don't have progress.

[willwarner]

"Italy for thirty years under the Borgias had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance. And Switzerland had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." -Orson Welles from the 1949 picture "The Third Man"

This is a really fantastic movie speech, and it's a damn shame that it's just a bunch of horseshit. It is true that public research funding for areas other than defense has weakened greatly, which sucks, and left corporations and hobbyists to pick up the slack, but the NSF is still doing a hell of a lot more than any public institution in Tesla's day.

As to lack of conflict breeding lack of innovation, this is precisely where you are wrong. Wars and other great pressures push inventions into the public eye-- how many people rode in an airplane before WWII compared to during?-- but inventors prefer to work when there aren't any bombs falling around them. I could belabor the point with examples, but I'm not even going to bother. Just look at anyone who's done anything at all with computers in the last half century. For starters.

Furthermore, the pace of technological progress and its impact on people's lives continues to accelerate. Plastic surgery, cell phones, commercial rocket flights, myspace. And we do have hero scientists and engineers, a trend that increased massively during the dotcom boom and never completely reversed, and was ironically led by Bill Gates, who is not a hero to most scientists and engineers, but was popularly portrayed as a hero engineer until about 1998 or so when the antitrust lawsuits really kicked in.

Finally, as to it being sad to see China becoming capitalistic, I would rather have a humane culture than an innovative one, but since America has been leading the world in both, it's a false opposition. And as to it being sad to see China becoming democratic, well, that rather remains to be seen.

Re:an extraordinary claim!

[imsabbel]

Actually, its kind of true (but with a different spin, of course).

The fact was, that the US program deemed the nuclear missile program as too sensitive and secret to let scientist mess with it, so they were forced to do a parallel development with the vanguard program (which of course lagged behind without the military budget).

The seperation was there, but the reason wasnt one of public image, but of paranoid secrecy.

Michener's Take

[BrianRagle]

The timing of this article is interesting to me as I am embroiled in the James Michener novel "Space" while traveling through Canada. Michener was known for his expansive historical sagas and attention to historical detail. In this case, his telling of the flurry of activity within American government and the embryonic space program is quite fascinating, especially now that we know from TFA that the Soviets were just trying something out. Whether the Soviets were trying to show the strength of Communism or merely throwing stuff into the air and seeing if it worked or not, the fact remains they boosted the American efforts in space to the point we are now, regardless of how bogged down we have gotten with the Shuttle in the last 20 years.

Re:Ha!

[JAlexoi]

I'll be putting it into overdrive:
      The credit goes to UK, well you know the rest why... Or maybe to the French?
      Or maybe the Romans? Hey! They were the ones that brought civilization to Britain.
      But there were the Greeks, with philosophy, mathematics and physics...
      Hey, hey, hey.... But Egyptians built the pyramids, and in fact started the civilization evolution.
Hope this will bring you back to reality...

I'm old enough to remember this

[John Jorsett]

I remember Sputnik, and I remember that everybody in the US went apeshit when it was launched. Our technological superiority was suddenly in question and there was a big push to start cranking out more engineers and scientists. My own career choice was partially influenced by those events.

Re:We don't have progress.

[zerocool^]

Today's amazing world of new discovery is the internet, man.

As a child of the 80's, I couldn't imagine living in a world where I didn't have instant access to infinite information, as well as interaction with people of all classes, races, and nationality. The internet is today's final frontier, it is the great equalizer, it is the breaker of barriers and opener of doors - and eyes. This is where social progress is being made. If you want to talk scientific progress as well, the modern day Einstein, Bell, and Tesla are now (in no particular order) Bram Cohen, Shawn Fanning, and Justin Frankel.

The internet is the most important thing humankind has produced, adapted, and adopted in the past quarter century. It is capable of breaking corporate monopolies as well as building massive revenue streams; capable of watching all the citizens, as well as watching all the watchers; capable of providing a channel for infinite entertainment, as well as many many jobs; capable of bringing all the peoples of the world together. Believe it; the internet is humankind's most valuable resource going into the 21st century.

~Wx

Re:The real space junk is the myths.

[GreggBz]

You know what always gets me is the money better spent argument.

Subtract Sputnik
Subtract Yuri G
Subtract a Man on the Moon
Subtract Hubble
Subtract the Voyager Probes
Subtract the Mir and the ISS
Subtract the Mars Rovers

First, you would have tiny science section at Barns&Noble, no neat documentaries on television and little or no satellite communications networks. You would have reduced meteorological warnings, reduced understanding of agriculture, global warming and the ozone layer, a reduced understanding of the Universe, it's meaning and what makes things work, reduced understanding of fission, fusion and the Sun, and no beautiful awe-inspiring photographs to look at on the Internet. In fact, the Internet might not work as well even, because of those satellite things above. And maybe the Vatican and Catholics still think we are the center of the Universe.

And secondly, we'd be stuck on this rock, with no hope of escaping. No doubt, we are all going to die here, eventually. What good will any human accomplishments ever be? If not for the above things, that would be the inevitable mindset, hopelessness. Have you ever really looked at the picture of Earth from the Moon? Have you ever read the Carl Sagan essay, Pale Blue Dot? I can think of no single picture, words and idea that brings humans together. It is everyones home, the only one we've ever had, after all.

A fraction, FRACTION of the federal US budget is spent on NASA. I, for one, see science and space exploration as beneficial to all humans. For me, every dollar that goes into a new probe, or improved human presence in space, whatever the "motivation" for doing so, is a dollar better spent.