Mankind’s exploration of space began with a walk across the Kazakh steppe.
It was led by a man in a white coat who walked in silence and answered only to
“chief designer”. Behind him trudged his underlings, exhausted after working
day and night to build the world’s first artificial satellite. And behind
them, along a mile of hastily laid tarmac, rolled the carrier rocket that
they hoped would put that satellite into orbit.
The rocket was a type that had blown up on five of its previous six flights.
Tucked neatly into its nose-cone was the polished aluminium sphere that
became known as Sputnik. It made that slow journey from assembly hall to
launch pad at the Soviet Union's secret Baikonur cosmodrome on October 2,
1957.
Two days later, a few minutes before 6pm, at a reception at the Soviet Embassy
in Washington, an usher entered with an urgent message for Walter Sullivan
of The New York Times. His office was on the phone. He took the call, then
headed immediately for Richard Porter, a scientist and fellow-American in
the throng in the ballroom. Sullivan whispered two words in Porter’s ear:
“It’s up.”
Sputnik was not just “up”. It was dancing round the planet at 18,000mph in an
elliptical orbit that brought it to within 155 miles of Earth’s surface at
some points and hurled it to an altitude of 500 miles at others, and seemed
to announce the victory of Soviet science over capitalism’s best.
That victory would be reversed. Capitalism did not just put men on the Moon,
after all; it put GPS on our dashboards and Google Earth on our desktops.
But Sputnik launched the space age, surprising almost everyone in the
process.
It was circling the Earth every 96 minutes and had twice passed directly over
the US before the chief designer even confirmed the launch to the Politburo.
After that the Tass news agency reported Sputnik’s existence to the world –
and the space race began in earnest.
For 24 hours, the two most powerful men in the world tried to act as if
nothing had changed. When Khrushchev heard that the launch had gone to plan
he congratulated those involved and went back to bed. In Washington,
President Eisenhower insisted that Sputnik didn’t bother him “one iota”. If
so, he was in a minority of not much more than one.
For most in the West, Sputnik inspired more shock and awe than the most
earth-shaking nuclear test. It was, according to Michael Griffin, the
present Nasa administrator, “an almost unimaginable embarrassment for the
United States... Sputnik changed everything”.
It was in space, and therefore an achievement of an entirely new order. Its
stammered greeting – “be-beep... be-beep” – was audible with any five-dollar
transistor radio as it passed overhead. It sounded innocent enough but
seemed to cloak nothing but menace.
Lyndon Baines Johnson looked up and saw a sky that suddenly “seemed almost
alien”. He immediately demanded a drive to build a US rocket with a million
pounds of thrust.
Another senior Democrat, Governor Mennen Williams of Michigan, wrote a poem:
"Oh little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in-Moscow beep,
You tell the world it’s a Commie sky
and Uncle Sam’s asleep.”
Reports from the Soviet Union helpfully noted that Sputnik could be seen at
dawn and dusk “with the aid of very simple optical instruments (binoculars,
telescopes etc.)”, and legions of observers were enlisted to scan the
heavens from 150 locations across the western hemisphere. The moment they
saw the fast-moving silver dot, they were to yell “mark!” into microphones
clipped to their lapels. The information was relayed to scientists in
Cambridge, Massachussetts to map Sputnik’s trajectory.
The satellite itself was no threat to anyone. Its carrier rocket, by contrast,
was nothing less than an intercontinental ballistic missile. Putting Sputnik
in orbit had proved that the Soviet Union could just as easily put a nuclear
warhead anywhere on Earth. But was it possible to track an ICBM in orbit? As
the shock began to wear off, that became paramount.
At first, no one had an answer. Then Sir Bernard Lovell, the builder of the
colossal new radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, got a call from
London suggesting that he temporarily turn it into a radar scanner. He did.
“A few days after the launch we got this marvellous echo,” he recalled in an
interview with The Times this year, at the age of 94.
The echo showed up as a line across a cathode ray tube representing the ICBM
streaking across Cumbria at five miles a second. “It was dramatic.” So
dramatic, in fact, that it is easy to assume that the race to put satellites
in orbit had long been a top priority for both superpowers. It hadn’t.
The Sputnik launches were a mere adjunct to the Soviet nuclear defence
programme. The US equivalent, based around the Vanguard rocket, was a
largely civilian effort, denied the benefit of the genius of Wernher von
Braun, the former German rocket designer working for the US military, and
all but doomed as a result. (Eight of 12 Vanguard launches failed.)
The official justification for spending money on satellites was scientific:
they were to be launched as part of the International Geophysical Year
(IGY), organised for 1957-58 by the International Council of Scientific
Unions. Leading scientists on both sides had great difficulty persuading
politicians obsessed with nuclear arms that satellites warranted the huge
investment needed to put them in orbit.
In fact the Americans inadvertently goaded the Soviet Union into decisive
action. In the summer of 1955, Eisenhower’s press secretary let slip that
the US was planning to launch a satellite within the IGY. That meant that if
the Soviet side put one in orbit before, it would be guaranteed a “win”. A
year later, in September 1956, the chief designer heard about a failed
American launch from Cape Canaveral that supposedly had a satellite aboard.
It didn’t, but the fear that Project Vanguard might be running to an
accelerated timetable led the Russians to accelerate their own.
The key player was the chief designer himself, whose name, Sergei Korolev, was
not made public until after his death in 1966.
Korolev was not only a leader and innovator every bit as dynamic as von Braun.
He was also a remorseless competitor who understood better than anyone the
power of symbolism in his fight for resources. He had to be first.
As late as August 1957, that looked unrealistic. Korolev wanted to put an
entire suite of instruments in orbit in a satellite weighing 1.3 tonnes. But
five rocket tests had failed, while Vanguard was aiming only to deliver a
token 3.5lb payload to orbit.
Then, on August 21, in its first successful test, the giant R7 rocket carried
a dummy H-bomb warhead 6,000 miles from Baikonur to the Kamchatka peninsula.
Korolev demanded a new, radically simplified satellite weighing just 83kg.
It had been on his drawing board since January, and would be built in one
month.
Not much bigger than a basketball, it was to contain batteries, a transmitter
and nitrogen pressurised to 1.3 atmospheres. Outside were four spring-loaded
antennae that, according to one of Korolev’s colleagues, made it look like a
galloping horse.
Once assembled, it was polished by hand and stored under a velvet shroud. A
replica hangs in the National Space Centre, made in the same factory as the
original. If it looks almost eerily authentic, it is because Korolev
demanded perfectionism in the manufacture of mock Sputniks. He once berated
a junior technician for not polishing one carefully enough: “This will be
exhibited in museums!”
The R7, designed for warheads weighing up to ten tonnes, would have no trouble
with Sputnik unless it misfired. The speed of 8,000 metres a second had been
established as the escape velocity for the Earth’s gravitational field in
1903, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, another Russian.
Fuelling the R7 began before dawn on October 3. Lift-off was at 10.28pm Moscow
time the next day. The first people to hear the beep were on Kamchatka, but
Korolev swore them to secrecy until he had heard it himself an hour later.
Then there were cheers, champanski and tears of relief.
The celebrations did not last long. As soon as he sensed the surge in Soviet
prestige, Khrushchev ordered another Sputnik for the 40th anniversary of the
revolution, a month away. To mark the continuing triumph of communism, a
mongrel taken from the streets of Moscow followed Sputnik into space. Laika
barked, ate a last meal and died of overheating after the thermal control
system failed five hours into her flight. In the Soviet euphoria and Western
panic of late 1957, she was not widely mourned.
