60 years ago... how a 2ft ball triggered space race
No-one expected Soviet satellite launch that upset balance of power and set in motion quest for the stars
IT WAS, much like the North Korean missile tests of this summer, a proactive strike that no-one had seen coming.
The launching by the Soviet Union of the world’s first earth satellite, exactly 60 years ago, shocked the western political and scientific community to its core. It immediately set in motion the space race and changed forever the balance of power between the world’s super nations.
Yesterday the anniversary was marked, appropriately, at the international space station, by the two Americans and one Russian who had taken a miniature model of the first satellite on board the Soyuz MS06 spacecraft. Six decades ago, no-one could have foreseen such co-operation, as the launch of Sputnik-1 triggered panic in Whitehall and at the Pentagon.
“You just cannot underestimate the shock to the American political and scientific establishment,” said Huddersfield University lecturer Dr Stephen Dorril, an expert on international intelligence and the Cold War.
“It was completely out of the blue. They just didn’t think the Russians would be able to do this kind of thing.
“And it opened up other areas because once you’ve got satellites you also have photo intelligence.”
The Soviets had, unbeknown to the west, been working on
Sputnik since the early 1950s. Both they and the Americans had recruited teams of displaced Nazi scientists at the end of the war to bolster their research teams.
Sputnik-1, a metal sphere measuring just under two feet and with four protruding antennas like the aerials of a transistor radio, was launched on October 4, 1957, at just before 10.30pm Moscow time, from a test range at the Soviet Defence Ministry.
Its flight lasted 92 days, during which it completed 1,440 elliptical orbits of the earth.
On January 4 1958 it left orbit and burned up in the dense atmosphere. But by then, the Russians had already fired a second shot across America’s bows, with the launch of
Sputnik-2, the first spacecraft to carry a living animal – a stray dog named Laika, who died a few hours after the launch.
The dog’s exact fate – it died from overheating – was not disclosed until 2002, and there has been speculation about the Russians’ motive for the two launches.
Dr Dorril said: “You could see it as a bit of a deception because they realised that they couldn’t out-do the US in production but they could in space exploration. They could present an image to the world of an advanced nation.
“By the end of the 1950s, US consumers had access to lots of goods that Russians did not have. Even the cars of the period had big fins, to make them look almost like spacecraft.
“But the Russians took the decision that space was more important than putting consumer goods into the hands of the general public.”
The decision still reverberates today, Dr Dorril said.
“The knock-on was huge. The US immediately had to spend more money on defence,” he said. “It forced them to develop their own technology more quickly. Eventually they had satellites that could look at the Soviet Union and find its silos for nuclear weapons.
“And there are arguments that the world economy is in its present state, with a prosperous Germany and Japan, because in the 1950s the UK committed to a Cold War economy, with investment in defence, and under Harold Macmillan, a last gasp of trying to make a spacecraft of our own. Germany and Japan never had to do that.”
They didn’t think the Russians would be able to do this kind of thing. Huddersfield University lecturer Dr Stephen Dorril.