Remembering Sputnik
Cobbled together while reading 50 year old newspapers, this is one I probably should have finished and sold. My apologies for the lack of a cohesive presentation!
54 years ago today, on October 3, 1957, Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched, the result of years of development by Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev, its chief designer.
Satellites obviously have a high reproductive rate. At last count, according to one source, there are currently 29,493 objects being tracked in near earth orbit!! This includes not only the satellites and their booster rockets, but a whole bunch of assorted space junk, including spare nuts and bolts.
For those of you not even born at that time, you might be wondering just how big an event the Sputnik launch was.
Its probably one of three days when 1950's baby boomers remember exactly where they where when the news broke -- the other two events being the assassination of JFK and that "one small step for 'A' man" incident.
If Sputnik had never launched, we wouldn't have had an entire era of communism paranoia that included huge sales of bomb shelters and the Bay of Pigs. More importantly, NASA and all that followed, including Tang, and the current state of weather forecasting and communications couldn't have happened. And the US government also wouldn't have shoved billions into science education in the decade that followed.
It was an event that mass media leaped upon with vigor.
TV Guide from November 30, 1957 lists a wide range of Sputnik-centric projects, from the rushed "Mars and Beyond" animated special from Walt Disney with lots of animation [and the world's dumbest looking 10-legged Martian Banth from Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars] to a CBS Close-Up program called Conquest, hosted by Eric Sevareid.
The launch also inspired writer Herb Caen to coin the term "beatnik" in an article about the Beat Generation in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 02, 1958, a mere 6 months later. [a story for another time ...]
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made the courageous decision to quit both teaching and writing SF full time, to dedicating himself to writing nonficion designed to educate the American public and public speaking. [his reactions are described in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt; he also has a lengthy letter in If: Worlds of Science Fiction from June, 1958 dealing with the Russian Sputnik program]. Reporters at the time had great fun with a sign Isaac had on his desk that read "They Said It Couldn't Be Done!"
Fellow writer Arthur C Clarke, in Barcelona at an International Astronautical Federation, at the time said the event "reduced the US to a second rate power". His quotes were paired in newspaper articles to balance statements by Eisenhower who insisted the launch was "no big deal".
The government's own actions, contrary to Eisenhower's public statements, proved they believed otherwise, however. Project Scoop, for years a serious program to "net" a returning satellite before it crashed to earth, was used to examine the possibility of capturing Sputnik when it fell to earth, since our military leaders suspected it of being a spy platform. At least one general argued for funds to send up a camera immediately to follow the satellite closely [but this was a last gasp public relations campaign to perpetuate the belief that US technology was leaps and bounds beyond the Soviets]
Science fiction writer Harry Harrison, just returning from LonCon I, the first international science fiction convention, with a host of other SF notatables when the news hit, suddenly found new markets and a decade long gig writing Flash Gordon for King Features, thanks to editor Sy Byck's search for 'realistic' outer space stories. Fritz Leiber likewise began writing Buck Rogers in response to the Dille's desire to do the same for their flagship comic strip feature.
TV hastily gave us an intelligent MEN INTO SPACE series with Jerome Bixby, later best known as a Star Trek novelist, as one of the writer. Movies gave us THE BLOB [of course], the FIRST MAN INTO SPACE, WAR OF THE SATELLITES and a whole lot more.
In his collection Danse Macabre from 1980, Stephen King relates how he sat in an audience of excited young people in a movie house showing Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, when the film was interrupted and the house manager made an announcement that the Russians had put a space satellite in orbit around the earth, called Sputnik. "We sat there," King says, "in absolute tomblike silence." This sudden terrifying intrusion of a world of adult political drama and potential doom, in the midst of science-fiction fantasy, made a powerful impression upon the 10-year-old.
And in Taunton, Massahusetts, this spoiled kid, addicted to such things as Flash Gordon and Asimov's Lucky Starr, whined a whole lot and ended up with a $300 telescope on the following Monday. I recall watching a blinking light in the sky [that I later learned was Sputnik's booster rocket instead] and listening to the Road Runner-ish "beep beep" it broadcast on a neighbor's ham radio.
That beep-beep was appropriate, since elsewhere the US rocket program was being compared to Wile Coyote's Acme Supply Company.
In the magazine Amazing Science Fiction for March, 1958, editor John W. Campbell's editorial chastised Americans for their satellite-launching failures and grudgingly praised the Russians for its Sputnik success. The August, 1958 issue gave us the informative essay "It Started with Sputnik" by Bertram A. Chandler.
*OUR* German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (the Russians had their own team of captured German scientists) suddenly became a media darling. Life Magazine followed its October 14, 1957 issue [which ran the "Soviet Satellite Sends U.S. into a Tizzy"] with a November 18, 1957 cover "starring" Von Braun. He also "starred" in the aforementioned Walt Disney special along with fellow German refugee and SF / pop science writer Willy Ley. Strangely, I couldn't find any quotes by later media darling Ray Bradbury in any newspaper or magazine until nearly 18 months later.
National Geographic for December, 1957 took a break from its anthropological endeavors to run "How Man-made Satellites Can Affect Our Lives" by Joseph Kaplan, the former U.S. Director of efforts during the International Geophysical Year of 1956.
John Christopher -- later best known for his War of the Worlds pastiche The Tripods Trilogy -- ran a widely syndicated article detailing the anticipated steps that would lead us (or them) from Sputnik to the moon.
Another SF writer and editor, G. Harry Stine, who reportedly lost his high level job testing rockets at the White Sands Proving Ground because of his "I told you so!" stance, wrote "Sputnik: One Reason Why We Lost" for the January, 1958 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Writer L Sprague de Camp was interviewed at the time, and he explained that the idea of an earth satellite could be traced back to the Greeks, specifically Aristophanes.
But he could also have pointed to a 17th-century clergyman who drew up plans for a spaceship powered by wings, springs and gunpowder, perhaps the first "serious" attempt at a manned flight to the Moon. Dr John Wilkins, scientist, theologian and brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell wrote a detailed description of the machinery needed in 1640. According to him, the gravitational and magnetic pull of the Earth extended only 20 miles and if it were possible to get airborne and pass beyond this point, it would be easy to continue to the Moon. [By the 1660s, the idea began to fall apart with the work of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who demonstrated the nature of the vacuum that would stretch between the Earth and the Moon.]
Here's some links to articles I found:
Boston Globe on Sputnik’s 50th Anniversary - http://tinyurl.com/2uh7jm
Associated Press on the 50th Anniversary - http://tinyurl.com/2ytjc2
Arthur C. Clarke: Remembering Sputnik - http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5584
54 years ago today, on October 3, 1957, Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched, the result of years of development by Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev, its chief designer.
Satellites obviously have a high reproductive rate. At last count, according to one source, there are currently 29,493 objects being tracked in near earth orbit!! This includes not only the satellites and their booster rockets, but a whole bunch of assorted space junk, including spare nuts and bolts.
For those of you not even born at that time, you might be wondering just how big an event the Sputnik launch was.
Its probably one of three days when 1950's baby boomers remember exactly where they where when the news broke -- the other two events being the assassination of JFK and that "one small step for 'A' man" incident.
If Sputnik had never launched, we wouldn't have had an entire era of communism paranoia that included huge sales of bomb shelters and the Bay of Pigs. More importantly, NASA and all that followed, including Tang, and the current state of weather forecasting and communications couldn't have happened. And the US government also wouldn't have shoved billions into science education in the decade that followed.
It was an event that mass media leaped upon with vigor.
TV Guide from November 30, 1957 lists a wide range of Sputnik-centric projects, from the rushed "Mars and Beyond" animated special from Walt Disney with lots of animation [and the world's dumbest looking 10-legged Martian Banth from Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars] to a CBS Close-Up program called Conquest, hosted by Eric Sevareid.
The launch also inspired writer Herb Caen to coin the term "beatnik" in an article about the Beat Generation in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 02, 1958, a mere 6 months later. [a story for another time ...]
Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made the courageous decision to quit both teaching and writing SF full time, to dedicating himself to writing nonficion designed to educate the American public and public speaking. [his reactions are described in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt; he also has a lengthy letter in If: Worlds of Science Fiction from June, 1958 dealing with the Russian Sputnik program]. Reporters at the time had great fun with a sign Isaac had on his desk that read "They Said It Couldn't Be Done!"
Fellow writer Arthur C Clarke, in Barcelona at an International Astronautical Federation, at the time said the event "reduced the US to a second rate power". His quotes were paired in newspaper articles to balance statements by Eisenhower who insisted the launch was "no big deal".
The government's own actions, contrary to Eisenhower's public statements, proved they believed otherwise, however. Project Scoop, for years a serious program to "net" a returning satellite before it crashed to earth, was used to examine the possibility of capturing Sputnik when it fell to earth, since our military leaders suspected it of being a spy platform. At least one general argued for funds to send up a camera immediately to follow the satellite closely [but this was a last gasp public relations campaign to perpetuate the belief that US technology was leaps and bounds beyond the Soviets]
Science fiction writer Harry Harrison, just returning from LonCon I, the first international science fiction convention, with a host of other SF notatables when the news hit, suddenly found new markets and a decade long gig writing Flash Gordon for King Features, thanks to editor Sy Byck's search for 'realistic' outer space stories. Fritz Leiber likewise began writing Buck Rogers in response to the Dille's desire to do the same for their flagship comic strip feature.
TV hastily gave us an intelligent MEN INTO SPACE series with Jerome Bixby, later best known as a Star Trek novelist, as one of the writer. Movies gave us THE BLOB [of course], the FIRST MAN INTO SPACE, WAR OF THE SATELLITES and a whole lot more.
In his collection Danse Macabre from 1980, Stephen King relates how he sat in an audience of excited young people in a movie house showing Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, when the film was interrupted and the house manager made an announcement that the Russians had put a space satellite in orbit around the earth, called Sputnik. "We sat there," King says, "in absolute tomblike silence." This sudden terrifying intrusion of a world of adult political drama and potential doom, in the midst of science-fiction fantasy, made a powerful impression upon the 10-year-old.
And in Taunton, Massahusetts, this spoiled kid, addicted to such things as Flash Gordon and Asimov's Lucky Starr, whined a whole lot and ended up with a $300 telescope on the following Monday. I recall watching a blinking light in the sky [that I later learned was Sputnik's booster rocket instead] and listening to the Road Runner-ish "beep beep" it broadcast on a neighbor's ham radio.
That beep-beep was appropriate, since elsewhere the US rocket program was being compared to Wile Coyote's Acme Supply Company.
In the magazine Amazing Science Fiction for March, 1958, editor John W. Campbell's editorial chastised Americans for their satellite-launching failures and grudgingly praised the Russians for its Sputnik success. The August, 1958 issue gave us the informative essay "It Started with Sputnik" by Bertram A. Chandler.
*OUR* German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (the Russians had their own team of captured German scientists) suddenly became a media darling. Life Magazine followed its October 14, 1957 issue [which ran the "Soviet Satellite Sends U.S. into a Tizzy"] with a November 18, 1957 cover "starring" Von Braun. He also "starred" in the aforementioned Walt Disney special along with fellow German refugee and SF / pop science writer Willy Ley. Strangely, I couldn't find any quotes by later media darling Ray Bradbury in any newspaper or magazine until nearly 18 months later.
National Geographic for December, 1957 took a break from its anthropological endeavors to run "How Man-made Satellites Can Affect Our Lives" by Joseph Kaplan, the former U.S. Director of efforts during the International Geophysical Year of 1956.
John Christopher -- later best known for his War of the Worlds pastiche The Tripods Trilogy -- ran a widely syndicated article detailing the anticipated steps that would lead us (or them) from Sputnik to the moon.
Another SF writer and editor, G. Harry Stine, who reportedly lost his high level job testing rockets at the White Sands Proving Ground because of his "I told you so!" stance, wrote "Sputnik: One Reason Why We Lost" for the January, 1958 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Writer L Sprague de Camp was interviewed at the time, and he explained that the idea of an earth satellite could be traced back to the Greeks, specifically Aristophanes.
But he could also have pointed to a 17th-century clergyman who drew up plans for a spaceship powered by wings, springs and gunpowder, perhaps the first "serious" attempt at a manned flight to the Moon. Dr John Wilkins, scientist, theologian and brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell wrote a detailed description of the machinery needed in 1640. According to him, the gravitational and magnetic pull of the Earth extended only 20 miles and if it were possible to get airborne and pass beyond this point, it would be easy to continue to the Moon. [By the 1660s, the idea began to fall apart with the work of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, who demonstrated the nature of the vacuum that would stretch between the Earth and the Moon.]
Here's some links to articles I found:
Boston Globe on Sputnik’s 50th Anniversary - http://tinyurl.com/2uh7jm
Associated Press on the 50th Anniversary - http://tinyurl.com/2ytjc2
Arthur C. Clarke: Remembering Sputnik - http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5584
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