Sputnik 



     by James E. Henderson 







Starting on October 4, 1957, there was a new sound 
broadcast on radio frequencies of 20 and 40 MHZ that 
brought terror to the world. The simple "beep-beep-beep" 
sound that faded and strengthened every 98 minutes came 
from a Russian satellite named Sputnik, the first man-made 
object to orbit the planet. You can listen to the sound 
produced by a working replica of Sputnik, built by French 
and Russian teens, launched from Mir on the fortieth 
anniversary of the launch of the original by visiting the 
website 

http://www.oceanes.fr/~fr5fc/angspoutnik.html . 

This is very appropriate, as we might well not have had 
Mir, modern computers or the Internet if not for the
paranoia triggered by the launch of Sputnik. You can 
also listen to the sound of the original Sputnik at the 
pop music webpage http://fiftiesweb.com/pop/sputnik.wav .

My own involvement with Sputnik was very minor. In the 
summer of 1958 I was hired as a Student Trainee to assist 
with the analysis of data in the Special Projects branch of 
the Navy Electronics Laboratory on Point Loma. Sputnik had 
temperature sensors and other instruments that produced the 
assortment of beeps and warbles heard in their radio signal, 
and this telemetry was recorded as black traces on gray 
paper by receivers at Brown Field. I made a very specific 
set of measurements on those traces even though I had no 
idea of their significance. It was manual labor and involved 
no calculations at all.

But I remember clearly the furor that surrounded the launch 
of Sputnik. The United States had tried to launch a 
grapefruit sized satellite into orbit using a vehicle called 
Vanguard, which had exploded on the launch pad. Sputnik was 
two feet in diameter and weighed 184 pounds. The United 
States was embarrassed. To make matters worse, the Russians 
quickly launched a second satellite weighing 1100 pounds and 
carrying a live dog. Those were years of madness anyway, 
when the United States, the Soviet Union, the French, the 
Chinese and, we suspected, others, had enough atomic bombs 
to end all life on the planet. Now the madmen had a new way 
to deliver their bombs anywhere in the world.

Suddenly colleges were overwhelmed with new students who 
wanted to become engineers and rocket scientists. 
Politicians and the news media busily attacked our 
educational system for having allowed us to fall behind in 
science and technology. Congressional persecution of 
scientists by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the early 1950s 
was blamed for the setback to the development of satellites 
and rockets. And the National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration (NASA) was created specifically to get ahead 
of the Russians in space.

The Russians did it us again, though, by being first to 
orbit a man, Yuri Gagarin, and bring him back alive. This 
prompted President John Kennedy to declare in 1961 that we 
would send a man to the moon and get him back by 1970. For a 
change we did beat the Russians, who decided to direct their 
efforts to creating a permanent presence in space with the 
space station Mir.

There were computers back in 1957, but their development 
was accelerated by the emphasis on the space program. Much 
of what we take for granted today was developed or 
accelerated as a result of the space program. Without the 
fear and shame generated by Sputnik, today's computers would 
probably be larger, slower and much, much more expensive.

My computer is old and  it doesn't work very well, but it is 
much better than the typewriter I would be using if I didn't 
have it.