This column was published in Lebanon newspaper 10.05.16.
Monday of this week marked an important anniversary in the history of the U.S. What were you doing 59 years ago on October 4? I was a freshman in the Lebanon Junior High building and I remember so well sitting at my desk as our teacher told us that Russia had put a satellite in space. I was only 14, and science was never my strong subject, so I didn’t understand at the time the historical significance of this event. I only knew my teacher was very concerned that day.
The Soviets called the satellite “Sputnik” which is the Russian word for satellite and it was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time on October 4, 1957.
According to NASA’s history website it was about the size of a beach ball and
weighed 184 lbs and took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth on its elliptical path. It traveled at 18,000 miles per hour. At its farthest point from earth it was 584 miles away and at its closest point it was only 143 miles away.
It was called an artificial satellite because it had been been intentionally placed into orbit as opposed to the moon, which is our natural satellite.
Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to earth strong enough to be picked up by Ham radio and it was visible in some areas with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset.
Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated in January 1958 and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
Sputnik was about 10 times the size of the first U.S. satellite, named Explorer, which was launched on January 31, 1958. Explorer weighed at launch almost 31 lbs, was 81 inches in length and six inches in diameter.
By then, the Soviets had launched Sputnik 2, with a dog aboard. According to the History website, they continued to stay ahead of us with the first man in space, the first woman and the first three men in space, also the first space walk, the first spacecraft to impact the moon, the first to orbit the moon, the first to impact Venus, and the first craft to soft-land on the moon. (I was not aware of most of these facts and double checked them to be sure because I found them very surprising.)
We finally got ahead of the Soviets when we landed two astronauts aboard the Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon in July, 1969.
Our efforts to catch up with Russia resulted in the term “the space race”. The space program was seen as necessary for national security and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority. The race started with the launching of Sputnik and was deemed to be over with the co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975. This project came to symbolize detente in the space programs, a partial easing of strained relations between the USSR and the US.
The beginnings of the space program occurred just after the end of WW2.
In the 1930’s Germany had begun to research and build operational ballistic missiles. During the last stages of the Weimar Republic, German aerospace engineers experimented with liquid-fueled rockets. One of their goals was to determine how to use rockets as long-range artillery in order to get around the Treaty of Versailles which effectively placed a ban on the research and development of long-range cannons.
When the war ended, American, British and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture Germany’s rocket engineers along with their rockets and the designs for them. The U.S. was fortunate that in a program called Operation Paperclip, Warner von Braun and most of his engineering team, who later helped develop the American missile and space exploration programs, surrendered to the Americans. Von Braun had been the technical director of Nazi Germany’s missile program.
The U.S. was also able to obtain many of the German V-2s which were the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missiles. They were developed in Germany during the War to be a vengence weapon, designed to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities.
In America, Von Braun and his team were sent to Fort Bliss, TX. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, AL. There Von Braun and his team would develop the Army's first operational medium-range ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket, that would, in slightly modified versions, launch both America's first satellite, and the first piloted Mercury space missions. It became the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn family of rockets. In 1958 the von Braun team was tranferred to NASA’s nearby Marshall Spaceflight Center to design launch vehicles in the Saturn family.
NOTE: I enjoy writing these Wednesday columns because doing the research usually forces me to step outside my comfort zone and educate myself on subjects which are not usually in my area of expertise. It always makes me feel good when so many of you tell me you learn so much from them, too. This column, more than any of the others, has been interesting to research because I had never known any of these details before.
Monday of this week marked an important anniversary in the history of the U.S. What were you doing 59 years ago on October 4? I was a freshman in the Lebanon Junior High building and I remember so well sitting at my desk as our teacher told us that Russia had put a satellite in space. I was only 14, and science was never my strong subject, so I didn’t understand at the time the historical significance of this event. I only knew my teacher was very concerned that day.
The Soviets called the satellite “Sputnik” which is the Russian word for satellite and it was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time on October 4, 1957.
According to NASA’s history website it was about the size of a beach ball and
weighed 184 lbs and took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth on its elliptical path. It traveled at 18,000 miles per hour. At its farthest point from earth it was 584 miles away and at its closest point it was only 143 miles away.
It was called an artificial satellite because it had been been intentionally placed into orbit as opposed to the moon, which is our natural satellite.
Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to earth strong enough to be picked up by Ham radio and it was visible in some areas with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset.
Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated in January 1958 and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
Sputnik was about 10 times the size of the first U.S. satellite, named Explorer, which was launched on January 31, 1958. Explorer weighed at launch almost 31 lbs, was 81 inches in length and six inches in diameter.
By then, the Soviets had launched Sputnik 2, with a dog aboard. According to the History website, they continued to stay ahead of us with the first man in space, the first woman and the first three men in space, also the first space walk, the first spacecraft to impact the moon, the first to orbit the moon, the first to impact Venus, and the first craft to soft-land on the moon. (I was not aware of most of these facts and double checked them to be sure because I found them very surprising.)
We finally got ahead of the Soviets when we landed two astronauts aboard the Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon in July, 1969.
Our efforts to catch up with Russia resulted in the term “the space race”. The space program was seen as necessary for national security and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority. The race started with the launching of Sputnik and was deemed to be over with the co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975. This project came to symbolize detente in the space programs, a partial easing of strained relations between the USSR and the US.
The beginnings of the space program occurred just after the end of WW2.
In the 1930’s Germany had begun to research and build operational ballistic missiles. During the last stages of the Weimar Republic, German aerospace engineers experimented with liquid-fueled rockets. One of their goals was to determine how to use rockets as long-range artillery in order to get around the Treaty of Versailles which effectively placed a ban on the research and development of long-range cannons.
When the war ended, American, British and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture Germany’s rocket engineers along with their rockets and the designs for them. The U.S. was fortunate that in a program called Operation Paperclip, Warner von Braun and most of his engineering team, who later helped develop the American missile and space exploration programs, surrendered to the Americans. Von Braun had been the technical director of Nazi Germany’s missile program.
The U.S. was also able to obtain many of the German V-2s which were the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missiles. They were developed in Germany during the War to be a vengence weapon, designed to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities.
In America, Von Braun and his team were sent to Fort Bliss, TX. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, AL. There Von Braun and his team would develop the Army's first operational medium-range ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket, that would, in slightly modified versions, launch both America's first satellite, and the first piloted Mercury space missions. It became the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn family of rockets. In 1958 the von Braun team was tranferred to NASA’s nearby Marshall Spaceflight Center to design launch vehicles in the Saturn family.
NOTE: I enjoy writing these Wednesday columns because doing the research usually forces me to step outside my comfort zone and educate myself on subjects which are not usually in my area of expertise. It always makes me feel good when so many of you tell me you learn so much from them, too. This column, more than any of the others, has been interesting to research because I had never known any of these details before.