"At 22 hours, 28 minutes and 34 seconds Moscow time on 4 October 1957, the world could see an artificial star that was created not by the gods but the hands of human beings." Thus spake Boris Chertok, last living Soviet rocket scientist who was involved in the project, Tuesday 25 September, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where the congress of the International Astronautical Federation was held.
And so our hideous species established itself in space, a mere 50 yrs. ago.
The only mission of Sputnik 1 was to emit radio signals at around the frequencies of 20.005 megahertz and 40.002 megahertz—which it did for twenty-two days before its battery power supply died. Its orbit deteriorated over the next three months, & it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere on January 4, 1958, having traveled about 60 million kilometers.
An earlier attempt to get Vanguard up & away. Ooops!
The second successful American satellite,
Vanguard I, remains in orbit. Telemetry stopped quite a while ago, however.
Hysterical reactions:
The United States was shocked. Senator Lyndon Johnson said the Russians had jumped way ahead of us in the conquest of space: "Soon, they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses!"
Jim Dawson, science writer for the Star Tribune, wrote about how his third grade teacher was very nervous at the time. His school at Omaha, Neb., was just a few miles from the Air Force's Strategic Air Command headquarters. A fleet of F-100 fighters appeared in the sky coming right for the school. MiGs!" the teacher shrieked. "MiGs!" She ran, hysterical, from the classroom, convinced they were about to be nuked by Russian fighter jets. The kids, mostly Air Force brats, ran to the windows to admire the F-100s, the coolest jet of its day.
The Economist has a "think piece" on fifty yrs. of space.
TIME offers 50 highs & lows of getting off the planet.
Sputnik: Celebrating 50 Years of Spaceflight.
The NYT waxes nostalgiac.
Sputnik's beeps, & some from other early birds.
Serious history of Sputnik. Serious history of Sputnik & the U. S. space effort at the time. A more personal history, from both sides.
Idiotic Attempt at Propaganda Dep't.: The stupid, it burns.
Bear in mind that w/o the Commies beating us to orbit, we might not have had ARPA (now DARPA) which lead to ARPANET, &, eventually, today's cyberspace, dominated by Just Another Blog (From L. A.)™, & a few other, less significant, nodes on the web.
"At 22 hours, 28 minutes and 34 seconds Moscow time on 4 October 1957, the world could see an artificial star that was created not by the gods but the hands of human beings." Thus spake Boris Chertok, last living Soviet rocket scientist who was involved in the project, Tuesday 25 September, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where the congress of the International Astronautical Federation was held.
And so our hideous species established itself in space, a mere 50 yrs. ago.
The only mission of Sputnik 1 was to emit radio signals at around the frequencies of 20.005 megahertz and 40.002 megahertz—which it did for twenty-two days before its battery power supply died. Its orbit deteriorated over the next three months, & it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere on January 4, 1958, having traveled about 60 million kilometers.
An earlier attempt to get Vanguard up & away. Ooops!
The second successful American satellite, Vanguard I, remains in orbit. Telemetry stopped quite a while ago, however.
Hysterical reactions:
Sputnik's beeps, & some from other early birds.
Serious history of Sputnik. Serious history of Sputnik & the U. S. space effort at the time. A more personal history, from both sides.
Idiotic Attempt at Propaganda Dep't.: The stupid, it burns.
Bear in mind that w/o the Commies beating us to orbit, we might not have had ARPA (now DARPA) which lead to ARPANET, &, eventually, today's cyberspace, dominated by Just Another Blog (From L. A.)™, & a few other, less significant, nodes on the web.
1 comment:
Although you didn't benefit, being a private-school type of guy, those of us imprisoned in public schools as kids benefited from the post-sputnik education boom, designed to help us "catch up" to the commies by pouring money into public education just as baby boomers were reaching school age. As for me, I still don't know my multiplication tables. I thought those fucking flash cards were a facist plot and, as was usually the case when I was a kid looking at the adult world, I was right.
P.
Post a Comment