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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."
Amsat.org has a page which features a little blurb as well as sounds from the first satellites. For Sputnik, there are two signal recordings.
.wav and .ra formats.
See http://www.amsat.org/amsat/features/sounds/firstsat.html
This page has the two recordings both in
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
This week's book of the week on Radio 4 is "Red Moon Rising", which is all about the building of Sputnik.
Available on Listen Again each day: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml
Paul Leader
Actually, a lot of Russian space technology was built on old technologies and as a result was quite reliable. For example, the R-7 rocket used to launch Sputnik used technologies from 20-s and there's a story that burning logs were used to ignite the first stage engines. But at the same time computer modeling (yes, even at that time!) was used to compute boosters parameters.
BTW, R-7 and its successors have become the most successful launch systems so far.
of Sputnik
http://www.prometheus-music.com/audio/surprise.mp3
written by Leslie Fish
Performed by Gunnar Madsen
published by Prometheus Music http://www.prometheus-music.com/
"When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor"
Please look again:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Space-Race-Apollo/dp/0813026288
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
My point expressed in GP still holds.
The book accompanies the BBC mini-series, which is highly recommended.
Here's an excellent book on the Soviet space program, written waay back in 1981; I picked it up in a second hand shop a few years later and was completely engrossed. Oberg's ability to stitch together a fairly comprehensive history of the then still highly secretive Soviet spac program from public open source material is excellent, and the revelations about the early catastrophes (like the launch pad explosion that wiped out 200 of the best launch technicians and engineers they had, plus the head of the entire ICBM program, and the tragic deaths of various cosmonauts) were amazing to me, 20 years ago anyway.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
In case you haven't seen the BBC docu-drama Space Race, watch it.
"In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 22 years later."
22 years! What?
I guess TFA meant 12 years.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
You mean, to the government? After all it was one state sponsored program against another. The US program had the advantage of the wealth generated by an efficient economy though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Laika died of a heart attack early in the mission (not too surprising!)"
There was no mention at the time of Laika dying in orbit, indeed the impression given was thet he safely returned to earth. Later on they mentioned him dying during reentry or euthanized by injection in orbit, or died of fright just after take-off, later on in a book written by one of the Russians who actually worked on the project there is mention of the mutt being electrocuted.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I thought that laika died in space from 'overheating", though
its temp was about 38C which was 'normal', and then they concluded they
needed not only to sustain air temp but provide a ventilator for air flow...
something like that...
> First, "the world" did not "gaze at the heavens in awe and apprehension" as Sputnik
> orbited. America gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, but as Americans often
> need reminding, America is not the entire world.
My parents have told me they "gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension", and they are not Americans.
I don't think you are correct. You are probably thinking of MX-774 which was never sucessfully launched; the first real launch was Atlas A in 1957 around the same time as the Soviet R-7. Moreover, it was used for both military and civilian purposes.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Saying that "science has reached it's limit" today is just as foolish as saying it in 1907 or 1807 would have been (and people did). It can be hard for a non-scientist to understand what current research consists of, and it can be even harder for a non-scientist to guess at what of current research will directly result in visible applications, but that doesn't mean that science has stopped - just that you can't see it move.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The Russians use the space pen too, and NASA didn't develop it.
Before the Fisher, NASA used grease pens because graphite tends to flake away, and in freefall, the graphite becomes a dirty cloud in the air (think black lung). The Russians didn't use pencils either, for the same reason.
You forgot "*First astronaut (cosmonaut) killed during a mission" (more than one, in fact, before the Apollo launch pad fire.
Not to mention that graphite is a conductor. Get a cloud of it in your electronics, and results should be interesting. So can we kill the russian pencil myth once and for all?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Are you kidding? Switching to Linux is '92 or so streamlined my downloading of images of boobs and provided me with uudecode and xv to see them. (Multiple command lines in X windows, sharing a dialup connection with SLIP, each downloading parts of a series of images so they could be re-assembled -- astonishing technology at the time.)
I'm utterly certain that Linux and Boobs have been in the same sentence before.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.