For those of us without inside knowledge, what were those Russian firsts in aviation (apart from getting the first SST into service)?
What about Sputnik-1?
On 4th October 1957 an R-7 Semyorka rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, carrying Sputnik, the Earth’s very first artificial satellite. Sputnik was named from the Russian phrase for “Simple Satellite” (Sputnik Zemli). This date symbolically marked the dawn of Space exploration, and beat the Americans into space by several months, but perhaps the most amazing thing about the spacecraft is that it only took around a month from inception to launch.
In the post-WWII years, rocketry was still an imprecise science. Great leaps were being made on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USSR the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka (SS-6 “Sapwood” in NATO parlance) was being developed as part of the arms race against the USA. The R-7 proved its ability to propel several tons of payload over great terrestrial distances, and calculations showed it could launch a smaller mass into orbit. So the go-ahead was given to develop and launch a satellite.
Sputnik-1 was launched on the night of 4th October 1957. The Soviet Union had initially planned a heavier and more complex design for the first satellite. However, under pressure to launch in the International Geophysical Year, the simple and aesthetically pleasing design for Sputnik-1 was chosen.
The satellite was a sphere of aluminium 23-inches (58 cm) in diameter and weighed 184 lb (83.6kg), with four long protruding antennas and it circled the earth once every 96 minutes. The sphere’s skin was just 2mm in thickness and it was filled with pressurised nitrogen gas. Internally, the payload consisted of batteries (which made up most of the weight) and a pulsing 1-watt radio transmitter operating on 20MHz and 40MHz. The transmitter was intended to convey simple telemetry about the capsule’s temperature and internal pressure by varying the transmitted pulse lengths. Sputnik’s mission was largely political — the famous “beep-beep” signal was broadcast on a frequency that anyone with a good shortwave radio could pick up, thus ensuring the widest possible audience, but it was also used to study the physical properties of the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The Reaction
The launch of the world’s first satellite grabbed headlines across the globe — except, strangely, in Russia. On the day of the launch, Pravda only carried a small report buried in other news. Western papers, on the other hand, trumpeted about the event: the New York Times, for instance, ran a three line banner headline:
“SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS ACROSS THE U.S.”
Other papers carried similar headlines. This response took the Soviet Union by surprise, but the following day saw much more reaction in the official Russian press, with a far more triumphant tone to the headlines. After 57 days aloft, Sputnik-1 re-entered the atmosphere and was destroyed. Sputnik-1 was followed a month later on 3rd November 1957 by the launch of Sputnik-2 which carried a small dog, called Laika (meaning “barker”), the first living creature in space (it died on re-entry).
The Americans responded by launching their Explorer-1 satellite a few months later in January 1958.
Subsequent Developments
For a while the USSR held the lead in space -the first man (and woman) in orbit, the first object to orbit (and land on) the moon. But all the while the USA was racing to develop its own space technologies.
By December 1958 the US had placed its first communications satellite into orbit (Project SCORE) and in 1962 Telstar provided a useful transatlantic link with sufficient bandwidth for television signals. And of course by the end of the sixties, the Americans had put men on the moon.
Today, satellites are taken for granted. We can receive TV via a dish pointed at the Sky satellite; most of our internet and telephone traffic is carried around the world by satellites; we see weather pictures from space, use our SatNavs to navigate and use Google Earth to gawp at our houses as seen from space.
But unless you were there at the time there was nothing like the excitement of tuning in a radio to hear the bleeping signal that came from that little aluminium sphere, the first man-made object in space — so Happy 50th Birthday, Sputnik!
In October 1957 I was a young RAF airman serving at RAF China Bay on the east coast of Sri Lanka and as soon as the radio frequencies being used were published we tuned in the ATC HF radio and listened to the “beep-beep” signals as it passed overhead.
Word soon got around and each time Sputnik was in range a crowd of eager airmen gathered in ATC to hear the “beep-beep” signal.