50 Years Ago, Sputnik Was an Improvised Triumph

caffiend666 sends in an AP article featuring interviews with the old men who launched the first satellite 50 year ago. The story they tell hinges on luck and the drive of one man, Sergei Korolyov, who died in 1966, unheralded in his lifetime. "When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph. But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West... 'At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done,' Chertok recalled. 'We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok'... And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket."

Comments

first mutt in space ..

[rs232]

"On Nov. 3, they launched Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds. It carried the world's first living payload, a mongrel dog named Laika, in its tiny pressurized cabin .. The dog died of the heat after a week, drawing protests from animal-lovers"

I recall reading somewhere that they fitted the dog with a cap containing electrodes and electrocuted it before reentry.

Re:first mutt in space ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall reading somewhere that the Earth is flat, but I don't think that's true. Laika died of a heart attack early in the mission (not too surprising!). The Soviets kept that bit quiet, to make the mission look more successful.

in the year 4949 ..

[rs232]

"One would hope that, 2,000 years from now, our descendants will all look back at Sputnik and see it as a great triumph of all mankind"

Actually, we won't have and descendants as in the reign of DubYA a system of orbiting laser platforms was constructed, which later on fried the whole planet due to the year 5000 software bug in MICROS~1.DOT.PerPETuity ..

Re:Ha!

Again, only a part of the story

[Ancient_Hacker]

A little more background info-- our German guys at Huntsville arsenal could have launched a satellite before the Russians. But our govt decided it would not be cool for the first thing in orbit to be pushed there by a rocket designed to launch a nuclear warhead. So our satellite program was required to start from scratch, with a completely peaceful launch vehicle.