If you are an American of a certain age, you know the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, beating the United States to orbit. You might even remember ham radio operators tuning into the satellites beeping. But you probably haven’t heard much about the team that built the vehicle, the problems they had, or the clever design choices they made. [Hoog] has a video that details the birth of Sputnik. You can see the video below.
The original plan was to launch a massive space lab, but it proved too ambitious. Keep in mind that in the late 1950s, you didn’t have tiny computers, high-density power sources, or advanced materials, and no one really knew what to expect in the Earth orbit environment. Even the viability of radio from the ground to orbit wasn’t a given. But Sputnik’s 1-watt transmitter did the job.
The event was part of the International Geophysical Year, but despite the agreement of international cooperation, the backdrop of the Cold War made politicians in the United States incite fear among Americans that the “Reds” were able to fly something over the United States both undetected and unopposed. Secretly, the US was pleased, as it wanted to fly spy satellites over the USSR, and this paved the way, since it could hardly complain if the US did the same thing the Soviets had already done.
The whole thing started the space race, which eventually led to the moon landings. It seems impossible that Sputnik was only 69 years ago. That means 70 years ago, there were no manmade satellites orbiting the Earth.
Watching the video, we’d hoped for more details about the internals but there just wasn’t time. However, we’ve covered that before (the main link is dead, but the detail links are still very interesting). The IGY was, for the most part, a great international cooperation, although few of its accomplishments are as memorable as Sputnik.
I was born in the Summer of 1957 and so I am slightly older than Sputnik. I was going through my father’s ham radio logs recently and on one of the pages from October 1957 I saw a notation that he had heard Sputnik. I knew he had heard it, but it was fun to find the actual log entry. Even more amazing, I found the page from 7 Dec 1941, where he noted that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and all hams were being ordered off the air. The next entry in his log was five years later, after he got out of the Navy.
Isn’t it interesting that a gap in a log, itself, can speak so loudly?
Your story is a reminder that, in the end, history isn’t necessarily about dates, places, or even the events themselves. Ultimately it’s about people.