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The "Simplest Satellite" That Opened up the Universe
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Sputnik 1 was launched 60 years ago to win a political space race, but its legacy is collaborative explorations far beyond Earth.
October 4, 2017, marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. It operated for only 92 days and did not carry any specific scientific equipment, but its transmitters generated radio signals heard around the world as the "beep... beep...beep" that marked the beginning of the Space Age. Over the years, the impact of Sputnik continued in the literal "sputniks" (which is Russian for , satellite) that followed, in the broader development of the Soviet and Russian space programs, and ultimately in the entire program of cosmic exploration that the tiny orbiting ball initiated.
The sheer magnitude of the Sputnik effect makes it difficult to analyze in a coherent way. As scientists whose lives are connected with space research and exploration, we are inclined to consider the event primarily as a scientific achievement. It is true that Sputnik itself was not much of a scientific spacecraft, but its launch was announced as a contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), an international program from July 1957 to December 1958 with science exchange and activities to better understand the planet Earth. Two satellite projects in the United States were likewise developed in the context of the IGY. The resulting Vanguard and Orbiter (later Explorer) projects emerged as rivals, not just to the Sputnik program but also occasionally to each other. Modern space exploration emerged from this multifaceted rivalry.
In the USSR, the project to build a satellite officially started in the beginning of 1956. Work on "Object D" (the classified designation of the future Sputnik 3) was assigned to engineer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev's Special Design Bureau No. 1 (OKB-1), then the leading Soviet organization for...