A quiet end to 1957 came with the launch of a metal beach ball with aerials, better known as Sputnik 1. Quiet, yet profoundly disquieting: the simple, incessant beeping of its radio signal broadcast to the world that the Soviet Union now had the ability to drop a nuclear warhead anywhere on Earth.
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| Source: Colorado State University |
Sputnik had been prompted by a U.S. announcement that they would soon launch a satellite of their own. The Soviets aimed to undercut the Americans by beating them to it, which is the main reason Sputnik 1 was such a simple device. They'd originally planned a much larger satellite incorporating scientific instruments measuring the solar wind, magnetic fields and cosmic rays, but the tight deadline meant they had to drop it for a very basic, proof-of-concept launch. The original device eventually flew as Sputnik 3, leaving Sputnik 1 to be... well, this video describes it best.
But what it was mattered less than where it was I.e. low-Earth orbit. As XKCD taught us, getting to space is relatively easy: the tricky part is staying there. Hitler's V2 rockets officially became the first works of our hands to reach space, peaking at a maximum 206km altitude if launched vertically, but these never carried enough fuel to boost their explosive payload into orbit. To do that, you needed to accelerate the vehicle to just shy of 8 kilometres per second, which wasn't a feasible goal for a Nazi mad-science project powered by haircare products. To do that required the unfathomable resources of a superpower with a chip on their shoulder.
Sputnik captivated the public like no satellite ever would again. Parties were thrown where everyone would go outside and lie down on the grass, hoping to spot it as it whizzed overhead. Ham radio enthusiasts worked feverishly to cobble together short-wave sets in the hope of hearing its famous beeping signal. Sadly, the window to do that was quite short, as the batteries ran out on 22 October 1957 – just 18 days after it had been launched.
But to those with young eyes, it was still visible in the sky if the orbit lined up right. Kurt Gottlieb, a design engineer at the Mount Stromlo observatory, told The Canberra Times it was, "a little brighter than the faintest star in the southern Cross." A certain Kym, 74, from Palmerston near Darwin, commented this to YouTube:
I saw Sputnik pass overhead, just south of Adelaide Australia on 4th October 1957. I was seven and with my uncle Dave at Christie's Beach. He had a pair of binoculars. Sputnik passed overhead from north-west to south-east, just after 8 p.m. local time – shortly after sunset. The evening sunlight was reflected by Sputnik's polished sphere, enough for it to be seen with binoculars or a telescope as a small light. I've been a Space Race kid ever since – and still have Dave's binoculars.
By the end of October, a Dr Przybyleski was able to comment that Sputnik's orbit was getting just over 4 seconds faster each day. A racing driver would commit bloody-handed murder to achieve something like that, but for Sputnik that could only mean its orbit was decaying – by pure geometry, a lower orbit is a faster one. Dr Przybyleski said it had lost 80km of altitude since its launch, and this indeed was the reason the Soviets had made it a sphere, so they could use its orbital decay to learn about the upper atmosphere. Sure enough, some time on 4 January 1958, Sputnik 1 finally fell back to Earth and burned up on re-entry, an event that took place somewhere near California. An Encino man claimed to find something glowing in his backyard that turned out to be the charred remains of a rubber hose, but whether it was actually part of Sputnik has never been determined.
Today the sky is so cluttered with orbital bits and bobs it's become the premise of a Sandra Bullock film, so it's sobering to consider that in 1957 no-one had ever seen a man-made object orbit the Earth before. I've heard tales of uncontacted peoples whose first experience of the outside world was noticing the satellites above and wondering what the hell they were, but I can't find them now so I can't comment on how true they are. What I can say is that some people will still set an alarm for a Starlink launch, and the real enthusiasts will still look for Iridium flares, but overall we've become a bit inured to it. So take a moment, once in a while, to cast your mind back to the days when everything was mechanical, and imagine what it must've been like to look up and see a new star gliding across the sky at warp speed – to see something that human eyes had never seen before.
