Space: the first baby step
JUST A SMALL SILVER SPHERE, BUT IT WAS ALL ABOUT R-7 ROCKET
When the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite 60 years ago, it marked both the beginning of space exploration and the start of a race between Moscow and Washington.
Sputnik, the tiny silver sphere with four spider leg-like antennae, showed off Soviet technological prowess.
But German scientists – who had worked on Adolf Hitler’s rocket projects and had been brought to the USSR after the war – were the ones who stood at the forefront of space achievement.
The founder of the Soviet space programme, Sergei Korolyov, worked with German scientists and fragments of the German FAU rocket to develop a new military missile, said Nikolai Shiganov, one of the scientists behind Soviet rocket R-7 which put Sputnik into orbit. “The Korolyov bureau had to create an intercontinental rocket capable of carrying a hydrogen bomb to any point on the planet,” Shiganov, now aged 97, said.
As he worked for the military, Korolyov dreamt of space conquest. But time was running out: one of the principal German engineers, Wernher von Braun, was already working for the Americans.
After three years of work and three rocket accidents, the fourth R-7 with a dummy warhead successfully hit its target in Kamchatka, in the Far East, in August 1957. The test was hailed as successful although the rocket head disintegrated in flight.
Creating a new rocket head would take much too long as the Soviets wanted to pre-empt the launch of a US satellite in 1958. So Korolyov suggested a simple satellite containing sensors, a radio and a battery pack. In just two months, the apparatus measuring 58 centimetres in diameter was ready, remembered Shiganov.
Though the satellite captured imaginations, with radio amateurs tuning in around the world to hear its simple calls, Sputnik was secondary to its inventors, Shiganov said. “The most important thing was that it proved the effectiveness of the R-7 rocket.”
On a sunny October Sunday, Shiganov was able to see the glint of Sputnik with his naked eye. “It was a tiny dot which shone in the sun because of its glossy surface,” he said.
Sputnik was in orbit for 92 days, making 1 440 circles around Earth, before burning up in the atmosphere.
Shiganov’s colleague Eduard Bolotov, 84, actually saw Sputnik as a young rocket trajectory engineer of 24.“I watched the launch through a gap from my post,” Bolotov said.
“Only at 3am we found out that Sputnik was in orbit and radios all over the world started to register its beeps.”
“Then we went back to our dorms and drank pure alcohol for victory of our rocket,” he said.