Dan's Papers - October 12, 2007 - Sputnik's Anniversary

October 4 was the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was a shock to our country that its hated adversary at the time, the Soviet Union, did this before we did. Now it turns out that it was a shock to the Soviets, too. Except for one guy.

It is hard to imagine today just how much hatred there was between the two ways of life in the 1950s. America had cars and TVs and was a Capitalistic Society where public officials were elected. The Soviets had none of that. Largely a country of academics, soldiers and peasants, its government had organized the country behind a single leader and a single idea. Everyone would work for the Motherland. Everyone would be paid the same. And everyone would get what they needed, with all the rest shared. The leader built an army to enforce this benevolent view of the world that was about five times the size of the American army in the 1950s. Nobody in the American Government doubted what would happen if these two behemoths went to war. We'd finish second. Although officials would never admit that.

Of course, there had been skirmishes. Communists tried to take over Greece but at the last minute were driven back. Communists attacked South Korea and got driven back. The Communists even tried to drive the Americans out of Berlin, another project that failed. But the Communists kept trying. What could be better than everybody working together in harmony for the Motherland under a great leader?

In 1955, America announced that it would be able to send a satellite to orbit the planet in 1958. At the time, Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II hero, was President. Like everyone else in America, he watched black and white science fiction shows on TV. There was "Captain Video." There was "Flash Gordon." "Star Trek" began around then. What better way to show the world the Capitalistic way to the future than by orbiting the Earth?

In Russia, meanwhile, there was none of this. All efforts by the government involved heavy industry to support defense and the army, food distribution, education and agriculture. Nobody watched television. There wasn't any.

What people did do for entertainment in Russia was go to plays, watch ballet and the symphony, play chess and read books and newspapers. Newspapers were controlled by the government. They told you what you needed to know. America going to space was not of any consequence.

What WAS of consequence were bombs and guns. America had ended World War II by dropping their secret Atomic Bomb. Three years after the war, Russian spies had the formula. In 1948, the Soviets tested its own bomb. In 1951, the military was charged by the Kremlin with building a rocket that could drop hydrogen bombs on American cities. And by 1955, they had built a rocket capable of just that. It was called the R-7. There was just one of them. And it had a ferocious amount of rocket fuel. It could propel itself twice as fast and four times farther than any American rocket. It could go halfway around the world.

All of this was top secret, of course. And if nobody in the Soviet Union cared about a spaceship or a satellite, there was one exception - a scientist named Sergei Karolyov. When he learned that America was starting a space program in 1955, he went to the Kremlin and asked if he could head up one for the Soviet. They approved, but thought it was silly. He was given one lab, about six associates and a few assistants.

Now, 50 years later, it turns out that one of these associates, Boris Chertok, is still alive, now 74 years old and he is talking. Although no documents about their "space" program of that era have been made public, and even today nobody is supposed to talk about it, he's talking. And he is describing what happened.

At this lab, the scientists went about designing and building a space satellite that could contain scientific measuring data, but without any hope that they could get permission to launch it aboard any rocket. Chertok claims that Korolyov went to the Kremlin several times and petitioned them to give him one. He'd describe the American effort, which went by the romantic name of "Vanguard." But it got him nowhere. He always came back empty handed.

In 1956, however, there were delays in the military that made it unlikely that the R-7 rocket would be able to be used for anything until about 1960. Korolyov now went back to the Kremlin and said rather than have it sit around for four years, he'd like to use it to orbit their satellite. The Kremlin could build several more R-7s in the interim. The Kremlin reluctantly approved.

In the spring of 1957, however, America announced that it would be ready to launch its satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year Celebration in 1958. Korolyov abandoned the big scientific satellite they were designing. He told them to build something very small, with just a radio in it. And rather than rocket-shaped, which the scientific satellite was being designed as, it should be round.

"For millions of years," Korolyov said, "there has been one moon. Now there will be a second, an artificial moon made in the Soviet Union."

Making Sputnik I, therefore, was easy. They made it out of aluminum, shined it up to reflect the sun, pressurized it as you might a bottle of Coke, and attached to it two radios and four antennas, each of which he set to beeping.

According to Chertok, the military, disturbed that Korolyov had gotten permission to launch the R-7, now heaped scorn on what this little group planned to put into orbit. "It's a toy," one General said.

Korolyov would simply not be denied. He motivated his assistants and associates to get this thing built. He turned away a request from one of his associates that they put in at least one scientific testing device. No time, he said. He set a launch date of October 7.

Someone told him that the Americans were lying about the launch date and would launch their Vanguard satellite on October 5, 1957. Korolyov requested and got permission to find out from the KGB if they'd heard of anything like this. When the reply came in the negative, Korolyov didn't believe it. He moved up the launch date to October 4.

The R-7, with Sputnik I, went off the launch pad on schedule, on October 4, with a thunderous roar.

But, Pravda, the government controlled newspaper, ran the news of the success of the mission with the launch of the Sputnik in a tiny article on page 38. Premier Khrushchev, it was said, didn't think much of it one way or another. He thought it was kind of a toy, too. But it did show that the Russians could get a leg up on the Americans in the same way they could get a leg up on building a bigger bomb or a bigger airplane.

According to his son, who was with him in Moscow when the R-7 went up in Kazakhstan, Khrushchev did turn on the radio for a little while and listened to the beep of the Sputnik, then went off to bed.

The next day, the fact that the Soviets had actually begun the "race" to space, was front page headlines on newspapers around the world. The American military was stunned. Scientists were interviewed and offered various excuses. Nobody had any idea that the Soviets were capable of this. This had been a failure of our espionage service. Where was our CIA?

After it became fully apparent in the Soviet Union that what they had done had stunned the world, they too understood just how important it was. It had changed everything. Now, two days later, there were screaming front page headlines in Pravda. And when Khrushchev was asked which lead scientist of his had made this amazing accomplishment, he said, "this was an achievement by the entire Soviet people." The KGB visited Korolyov. They told him he was not to say a word about his lab. And if he had papers to publish, he should publish them under the name Professor K. Sergeyev.

In America, it was announced that the CIA had learned that Leonid Sodov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, had led the effort. But, in reality, he had nothing to do with it, according to Chertok.

Khrushchev called Korolyov into his office in the Kremlin. "November 7 is the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution," Khrushchev told him. "Build us a bigger satellite. And launch it before November 7."

Korolyov launched a second R-7 bearing a satellite weighing 1,118 pounds or ten times more than the first, on November 3. Included in it was a dog, the first living creature ever launched into space. The dog died after five days, resulting in a heap load of scorn from dog lovers around the world. But nevertheless, there it was. The accomplishment became the centerpiece of the Bolshevik Revolution celebration.

There are people today who still remember seeing the little blinking light, as big as a star, slowly moving across the sky over America as the satellite circled the globe. The beeping stopped after two weeks. But the blinking light stayed up for three months, a reminder that Sputnik had defeated the Americans. Eventually, it burned up in the atmosphere, and it was over.

Two years later, upon assuming the Presidency, John F. Kennedy announced in one of his first speeches that the Soviets may have been the first people to orbit the Earth, but the Americans would beat them to the moon. America would set foot on the moon before the end of the 1960s, he vowed. We would beat the Russians into space. And, of course, we did.

As for the Soviet program, after Sputnik II and a few more orbits, that was about it. We might have been trying to beat them. But they weren't racing.

"We knew we would not be the first on the moon," Chertok said. "Our electronics were inferior. We were not going to catch up."

What they were building were R-7s and the successors to the R-7s. And their cosmonaut program and their new complex called Star City were just the backdrop for the building of a proposed space station, which they never did build.

Indeed, it wasn't until the early 1990s when the Russian Republic joined up with the Americans to build an orbiting space station that we learned that there was nothing in the American arsenal of rocketry that was as powerful as the R-7 rockets produced by the Soviets. And that's what was used to build the space station.

As for the blinking light, well Chertok says that was not Sputnik. It was the light on the front of the second stage of the R-7. Sputnik, the toy, had no light.