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."
I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:5, Interesting)
Congratulations are due on the anniversary of this achievement and to their many achievements since. May they have many more, and may they help elevate this world and all that are in it.
Re:I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:4, Funny)
Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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"I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter."
(This comment is intended to substitute for a +1 Insightful.)
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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 :-)
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.
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Wouldn't these achievements be much greater if they were the product of voluntary human cooperation?
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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...
Re:Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
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*prepares Dispell Ghost of Truman spell*
Begone! The Cold War is over! Your rhetoric rings hollow with no potency or power to incite passion. Begone and take your empty words with you!
Dude, you must invoke the Words of Might "Terrorist", "Microsoft", "patents" or maybe "emacs" to get a reaction here.
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Re:I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations for getting 'linux' and 'boobs' into the same sentence. I don't think that's ever been achieved before.
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Whereas 'congratulations' and 'boobs' in the same sentence is something that Pamela Anderson is becoming increasingly tired of.
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And congratulations to you too for getting from Linux to Pamela Anderson. Albeit via the unusual route of 'boobs'.
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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 t
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Re:I raise my glass to the Russians... (Score:5, Informative)
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Other Notable Achievements (Score:5, Interesting)
* First mammal in space (dog)
* First human in space
* First human to orbit earth
* First images of far-side of the moon
* First images from surface of moon (lander)
* First landing and images from surface of another planet (Venus)
A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:3, Interesting)
It's kinda easier if you only have to announce launches AFTER they were successful. If it ain't, it's a test launch. Just like a lot of people play Minigolf.
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Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:5, Informative)
My point expressed in GP still holds.
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(slaps himself)
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You're doing great! Just one more to make it right:
s/TFA/FA/
s/RTFA/TFA/ (Score:3, Funny)
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You said a mouthful there.
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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.
Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:5, Interesting)
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After WWII, when Peenemunde was liberated, the Americans got the scientists and some of the parts of the V2s, and the Soviets got the engineers and the machinery for producing the V2s. I think that has something to do with
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Please look again:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Space-Race-Apollo/dp/0813026288 [amazon.com]
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Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, that's my strategy too! (Score:2)
When developing software, saying "It builds without errors" means the product is ready for Production!
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US also used trial-and-error (Score:2)
To be fair, the US was also in trial-and-error stage in the early days. Rockets would often blow up on the launch-pad, and the US Ranger moon mission took 7 tries, SEVEN tries, before they had a success (which is a fascinating story in itself, BTW).
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It was the English to write "Coming home on a Wing and a Prayer". Nowdays, nobody in the UK can even remember the words of it. As a comparison just ask a Russian about "Hvost probit, bak gorit, no machina letit na chestnom slove i na odnom kr'le" (that is the russian version). While they have not written the song it fitted their mentality so well that they sing it till today (and claim it to be their
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
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In Soviet Russia ... (Score:2, Funny)
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]
Russian logic? (Score:2, Funny)
Ooookay.
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So, any stereotypes missing?
The effects.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
There were some benefits in the existence of the Soviet Union.
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Eisenhower wanted the Soviets to be first in space (Score:4, Interesting)
The top US space priority in the late 1950's was developing photo recconnaisance under cover of the Discoverer program.
Niksput (Score:2)
And then Asia did the same thing, flooding the market with engineers the same way they did Walmart toys, making sci/tech cheap and NON-cool again. Asia did a "Niksput" on us.
10 Ways to Commemorate Sputnik (Score:3, Interesting)
http://rocketry.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/all-things-sputnik/ [wordpress.com]
Improvised "Triumph" (Score:4, Funny)
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BBC Space Race (Score:3, Informative)
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Better read Chertok's memoirs (http://www.astronautix.com/articles/chemoirs.htm) and his book "Rockets and people" (unfortunately, I can't find its translation in Internet, but I know it exists) if you want to know about Russian space program.
12 years, not 22 years (Score:3, Informative)
22 years! What?
I guess TFA meant 12 years.
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The real space junk is the myths. (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
"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.
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I don't know that much about India's history, so I won't speculate how people there felt.
Sigh; Another anti space troll, but have to answer (Score:2)
BTW, America putting Man on the moon helped America in the same way.
A
Re:The real space junk is the myths. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Again, only a part of the story (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Thats correct depending on your source. The US was apprehensive about publicly breaking international no-fly zones and setting a precedent tha
Re:an extraordinary claim! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The Jupiter C [astronautix.com] rocket was capable of orbiting a satellite prior to October, 1957:
We don't have progress. (Score:2, Interesting)
We are living in unexciting times, science and technology are developing slowly and in a linear manner, normal progress instead of breakthroughs. It has been so for the last 50 years. I envy the people that got to see 1880-1960 - they could wake up and see their world upside-down due to a breakthrough(or a war...). Flight, television, nuclear power, space travel, transistors, jets, relativity... They actually had hero-scientists/engineers b
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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, whi
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Dotcom boom "technology" ?!?!!? Dotcom boom was not about technology, it was about doing the same business, but online. The biggest "bo
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Ah, so what you're saying is anything that causes your argument to fail doesn't count?
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Hawking, Rutan, Torvalds, Jobs.
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Re:tard (Score:2)
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In the 20th century, we pushed the envelope on what the science of the time would allow. I might be naive to say this, but by the 70s, modern science was rapidly approaching its limits (at least on the frontiers that were being explored at the time)
Now that we've reached that limit, we're starting new frontiers open up, particularly in how we can engineer new products and materials out of existing technology --- this doesn't occur through breakthroughs or sudden leaps and bound
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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
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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,
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all this talk of sputniks... (Score:4, Funny)
Recall the mass media complaining about possible radioactive fallout over India, some years ago, from a Russian sputnik that was nuclear powered? Today's sputniks are far more powerful then the ones that caused that 1908 Tunguska Explosion because they are nuclear powered and the Russians are not using nuclear power to only spy, no way! Plus today's sputniks are fully computerized and do things much faster. The Special Sputnik Forces of the Russian Military tell me that they care very easily kill over 95% of all Americans, with their sputniks alone, no nukes, without any warning what so ever, in a matter of a few minutes, any time that they care to do so. But the Russians can only vaporize a limited number of cities and then they will cause a nuclear winter sort of event that will kill them, too. - And we couldn't have that now could we? Carrying a dire warning on the very first page that "USA to be annihilated!", this website, http://hometown.aol.com/nancyaluft/ [aol.com], is the home of dedicated net kook and certifiable paranoid Nancy Luft whom, with her genius level IQ (which would account for her excellent grasp of grammar and sentence construction) and her BA (whoo-hoo!) is trying desperately to warn us all of the terrible dangers of Russia's Special Sputnik Forces. Since time immemorial Russian sputniks (which, she tells us early in the piece, means "travelling companion") armed with gamma rays and ray guns have been causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, Presidential assassinations, space shuttle disasters and all sorts of plagues and pestilences. They've been at it for centuries, even before the invention of spaceflight and, heck, even before there was a Russia! The Tunguska impact in 1908 for example wasn't a meteor, it was caused by Russian sputniks! MS, cancer, heart attacks, crop circles and every air crash ever have all been carved out by an orbiting army of Russian killer satellites shooting everything that moves with an array of invisible ray beams. They were also responsible for Nostradamus making his predictions, Jesus walking on water, Edgar Cayce healing people by touch alone and Abe Lincoln winning the Civil War. Oh, and they also caused Mt St Helens to explode and shot down the space shuttle Challenger, which she tried to tell people about but they wouldn't listen. And how does Nancy know these things? The Russians are transmitting their thoughts to her by microwave. She's tried writing to various Presidents about all this but, strangely, they just don't take any notice.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20020604012811/members.aol.com/nancyaluft/index.html?mtbrand=AOL_US [archive.org]
Korolyov's legacy. (Score:3, Interesting)
50 years later still looking for an explanation... (Score:2)
Rude summary (Score:3)
Interesting reaction coming from the USA. (Score:2, Interesting)
That always reminds me of NASA referring to Yuri Gagarin as to "The first European in space". Even 50 years later the US-American ego is badly hurt by Soviet supremacy in space.
Nevertheless, it is one of the greatest achievements of mank
Michener's Take (Score:2, Insightful)
My Mom was thrilled (Score:2)
At the time my folks perceived it as a triumph for humankind.
My mom's take on it was that it meant all the pictures of those wheel-shaped space stations... Arthur C. Clarke... Werner von Braun on the Disneyland "Tomorrowland" segments... Willy Ley... the Chesley Bonestell murals in the Hayden Planetarium... the George Pal "Conquest of Space" movie (ugh)... (that one might have been after Sputnik)...
I'm old enough to remember this (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Surprised (Score:2)
Weknew that then (Score:2)
That's hardly a revelation. My father took me out in the front yard and showed me the blinking light. He told me you couldn't see the actual satellite and that this was the booster rocket. And he was a bartender. It was common knowledge at the time.
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Re:While the Apollo program was a deliberate succe (Score:2)
YES. And who modded you up?
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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...
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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:5, Interesting)
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.
- Sputnik 2 couldn't reenter, so mechanisms were added to euthanize her. There was enough food and supplies to keep her alive for a week. The mechanism was poisoned food, not electrocution.
- Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] she died after 5 to 7 hours into the flight because the temperature control system failed.
Also notice that Laika's death is mostly played up in the US, probably becuase of cold war propaganda. The rest of the world knows who Laika is, and is surprised to learn that she died in orbit.
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Six in my case but I still remember the adults pondering the implications of this Russian "thing" right over their very own heads.