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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."
Nope, the credit actually goes to the USA, again. The Russians succeeded because they had bigger rockets, which could heave their larger nuclear weapons. The USA had smaller rockets because our nuclear weapons were more refined, and therefore physically smaller.
But why did the USSR need the rockets and the nukes in the first place. That's right, because of the USA, and that's why we deserve all the credit for Sputnik.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Conservatives who say snarky things get rated troll. Liberals who say snarky things get rated funny.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan