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

Sounds of Sputnik

[gbobeck]

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.

See http://www.amsat.org/amsat/features/sounds/firstsat.html
This page has the two recordings both in .wav and .ra formats.

Red Moon Rising - BBC Radio4

[NoNeeeed]

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

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

[Cyberax]

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.

Re:A lot of the Russian program was improvised

[mahmud]

[...] throw lots of money at the problem and hope some sticks... What money? Read the RTFA! It was an impromptu project by one man and his team of scientists, a creative effort to push the existing tech and skills to their limits, not a government project with slipping deadlines and inflated funding. And anyway, Russian space program was funded sparingly for most of its history, when compared to NASA.

My point expressed in GP still holds.

Re:I raise my glass to the Russians...

[OriginalArlen]

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.

Re:Ha!

[hey!]

I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due.

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.