Sputnik!

T

he announcement of the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviets (Figure 6.1), like a bolt of lightning, instantly changed the complexion of the space program. In many ways, it changed from a collaborative international scientific research program to a race to demonstrate technical superiority during the cold war. It is certainly true that scientists successfully maintained a strong scientific content throughout the early history of the Space Age. But the surprising demonstration of the superiority of Soviet rocket capabilities alarmed everyone in the United States, from military planners to the general public, and precipitated a huge effort to catch up.

Early indications of Soviet intentions

The Sputnik 1 launch should not have come as such a surprise. There were many hints before October 1957 that the Soviet Sputnik would be appearing in our sky. Many of those were missed, ignored, or downplayed by all but the most astute observers. With the supreme confidence of U. S. satellite planners, accompanied by growing public interest resulting from the open publicity surrounding the Vanguard program, and with the Soviet program lurking behind its curtain of secrecy, we were blinded to the growing possibility that the Soviets might be able to enter space before us.1

A substantial body of USSR books, scientific and technical papers, newspaper and journal articles, and items in the popular science magazines carried such hints between the early 1950s and 1957. They provided ample evidence of a growing interest in the subject within the Soviet political, scientific, and public arenas. They covered a wide range of topics, ranging all the way from fanciful dreams and speculations to highly detailed descriptions of equipment, studies of weightlessness, and development of

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flight procedures for cosmic exploration. Many of those articles included interviews with widely respected scientists and engineers.

There were other specific indications of a Soviet intent to enter space. As early as November 1953, A. N. Nesmeyanov, then president of the USSR Academy of Sci­ences, told the World Peace Council in Vienna, “Science has reached a state when it is feasible to send a stratoplane to the Moon, to create an artificial satellite of the Earth.”2

On 16 April 1955, six months after the International Union of Geodesy and Geo­physics passed its resolution that a satellite program be added to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) program, the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva re­ported that the Soviet Union planned to launch such a spacecraft. The article went on to tell of concrete actions toward that end, including the creation of an Interde­partmental Commission on Interplanetary Communication, chaired by Academician Leonid I. Sedov and reporting to the Academy of Sciences. Membership on that com­mission included a number of preeminent Soviet scientists. One of the commission’s explicitly named tasks was to launch a scientific Earth satellite to study the effects of weightlessness and of ultraviolet and X-rays from the Sun and stars and to observe ice floes and clouds. Moscow radio reported that a team of scientists had been formed to build the satellite.

On 30 July 1955, the day following President Eisenhower’s announcement of the U. S. plan to launch a satellite as part of its contribution to the IGY, the Kremlin tentatively revealed that the USSR planned to launch satellites during the IGY.

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Sedov, heading the Soviet delegation to the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen in October 1955, repeated the idea at a press conference that they, too, might be in the satellite game. Choosing his words carefully, he said:

From a technical point of view, it is possible to create a satellite of larger dimensions than that reported in the newspapers, which we had the opportunity of scanning today. The realization of the Soviet project can be expected in the comparatively near future. I won’t take it upon myself to name the date more precisely.3

Despite the press articles and Sedov’s statement, the USSR made no official de­cision on launching an IGY satellite until early 1956. It was then that the USSR Academy of Sciences quietly made an internal commitment to launch an IGY satel­lite within two years, and authorization for its development was made in the form of a decree of the Soviet Council of Ministers on 30 January 1956.

It turned out that that decision was not immediately followed by specific actions to meet the challenge. As the year progressed, progress was lagging, in the opinion of the chief USSR rocket designer, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, and his allies. One of those associates, Mstislav Keldysh, appealed to the Soviet Academy of Sciences on 14 September 1956, only a year before the Sputnik 1 launch, for more vigorous action. During his presentation, Keldysh stated that they were considering “placing a live organism in the satellite—a dog.” He proceeded beyond that to tantalize them with visions of a flight to the Moon to take pictures of its dark side. His final remark to them was to urge, “It would be good if the Presidium were to turn the serious attention of all its institutions to the necessity of doing this work on time. . . . We all want our satellite to fly earlier than the Americans.”4 In spite of his appeal, the USSR satellite development continued to lag.

There continued to be external signs of the Soviet commitment. In September 1956, Ivan P. Bardin very clearly advised the attendees of the Fourth IGY COSPAR meeting in Barcelona, Spain, that the Soviet Union “intends to launch a satellite by means of which measurements of atmospheric pressure and temperature, as well as observations of cosmic rays, micrometeorites, the geomagnetic field and solar radiation will be conducted. The preparations for launching the satellite are presently being made.”5

By November, the Soviet plans were finally taking tangible form as a duo of satellite designs. Their pride and joy, the one intended to be launched first as their primary contribution for the IGY, weighed in at almost a ton and a half. It was loaded with an assortment of scientific instruments, including, among others, a magnetome­ter, photomultipliers, a mass spectrometer, ion traps, and photon and cosmic ray detectors.

OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

A second satellite would be very simple—a 184 pound sphere carrying a pair of radio transmitters radiating at frequencies that would make it easy for radio amateurs and anyone else with a simple receiver to receive its signals.

Because of the slowness in getting the program up to full speed, and difficulties in getting all of the flight hardware to operate properly, the launching order was ultimately reversed. The second design became the first Sputnik. A new satellite design with the dog Laika was hurriedly prepared and launched as Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957. The fully instrumented satellite, after a first launch failure on 27 April 1958, was finally launched on 15 May 1958 as Sputnik 3.

The decision to choose the simple 184 pound satellite for first launch was made only because of the Soviets’ intense desire to beat the United States into space. In a much later interview, Gyorgi Grechko, an engineer who worked on the early USSR satellite program, stated:

But, these devices [referring to the instruments for what became Sputnik 3] were not reliable enough, so the scientists who created them asked us to delay the launch month by month.

We thought that if we postponed and postponed we would be second to the U. S. in the space race, so we made the simplest satellite, called just that—Prosteishiy Sputnik, or “PS.” We made it in one month, with only one reason, to be first in space.6

It appears that the Soviet decision to launch the simple version had already been made by the time of a meeting at the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in June 1957. At that meeting, the Soviet Bardin provided a document to Lloyd Berkner, the Comite Speciale de l’Annee Geophysique Internationale (CSAGI) reporter on rockets and satellites, titled USSR Rocket and Earth Satellite Program for the IGY. In the informal discussions outside the meetings, the Soviets talked quite openly of their plans, contrary to later popular claims.7

Within a month of that meeting, Radio, a Russian amateur radio magazine, included two articles giving a reasonably comprehensive description of that satellite’s intended orbit. It went on to tell how its approach could be predicted by receiving stations anywhere along its path, and how its 20 and 40 MHz signals could be received. They went so far as to include instructions for building shortwave radio receivers to pick up the signals, plus a direction-finding attachment for locating the satellite.

Those articles appear not to have entered the consciousness of U. S. scientists and officials until they were introduced by the Soviet attendees at the CSAGI Conference on Rockets and Satellites during the week of the first Sputnik launch. The primary response to that information at the conference was shock and irritation that the Soviets had departed from the agreed-upon frequencies for transmission. It was not interpreted as an indication that the launch was hard upon us.

Development of a suitable launching rocket was the key to orbiting an Earth satellite. The U. S. planners decided upon the development of a new launch vehicle derived

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from technology developed for nonmilitary scientific research. There were a number of reasons for that. One was the desire to keep the U. S. satellite program distanced as much as possible from any signs of military involvement. The more complete story of that decision is related in Chapter 7.

The Soviets had no such compunction. In those days, practically no significant high-technology activity was conducted within the Soviet Union that did not have either military or propaganda implications. They were nearing completion of the development of their first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), the R-7 (SS-6 Sapwood), by a team under the leadership of Sergei Korolev. On 15 May 1957, the first R-7 test launch resulted in an explosion upon ignition. Four additional attempts during the summer also failed. Finally, on 21 August 1957, an R-7 rocket flew 4000 miles over Siberia, landing in the Pacific Ocean near the Kamchatka Peninsula. After a second successful launch, Pravda on 27 August announced to the world that successful tests of an ICBM had been carried out.

It was after that success that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev finally yielded to arguments by Korolev and others and gave his approval for the launch of the satellite that had been under development for such a long time. On the centennial of Tsiolkovsky’s birth, 17 September, the Soviet government promised the world that a satellite would soon be launched.

Although the significance of the Pravda announcement in terms of the Soviet Union’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons to any point on the Earth was clearly rec­ognized, there was no expectation in the West that that rocket’s first major assignment would be to loft an instrumented payload into Earth orbit only a few weeks later. U. S. scientists and engineers remained supremely confident that they would launch a satellite into Earth orbit long before the Soviet promise materialized.