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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."
Yes, yes, I know!
I'm actually quite capitalistic, but one must give credit where credit is due. The Russians did a great deal to bring us to where we are today in terms of space exploration. 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, not just the accomplishment of one tribe trying to best another. The likelihood of this occurring is, of course, quite small, but one can dream.
I mean, just think about it - these guys put an object in orbit. It's common place today, I know, but to think that they were able to get it to work the first time still amazes me.
Excellent work, comrades. Excellent work!
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.
Second, in the 1950s everyone was shitting themselves over the prospect of a global thermonuclear holocaust, and so the whole space race was the transformation of rocket science from a cool but fairly arcane and quiet field of science into some sort of overhyped modern day mythic single combat, with astronauts painted as knights in white armor championing and defending their tribes, doing some sort of weird imaginary battle in the skies. It wasted a lot of tax money that could have been better spent on American schools and hospitals and Russian food and clothing, and did pretty much nothing towards overthrowing the tyranny of Stalin, who killed many more of his own citizens than Hitler, or making the governments of the US and USSR understand that the other side were in fact humans and not demons or animals.
It did get a whole hell of a lot of astronauts laid like you wouldn't believe, though. I strongly recommend reading Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," even if you have forgotten how to read an entire book, because it's an easy read and very well worth it. I especially love the section where he describes how Chuck Yeager pretty much ascended bodily to Pilot Heaven when he became the first person to break the sound barrier during level flight on October 14, 1947, years before the space race was even so much as a bad dream.
Finally, the USSR had the early lead in unmanned flight but the US eventually won in manned flight, so you could say that in Soviet Russia, people launched rockets to the moon, but in the United States, rockets launched YOU!