What happened as a result of the launch of the soviet satellite sputnik?

When the news broke on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had sent the world’s first man-made satellite into space, the American public was shocked. The C.I.A., it now appears, much less so.

This week, the agency declassified 59 memos, reports and summaries to mark the 60th anniversary of the day the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 went into orbit.

The documents — which include information about Soviet missile capabilities and several Sputnik satellites — suggest that in the years leading up to the first Sputnik’s success, United States intelligence agents and government officials were growing more and more certain that a launch was imminent.

“U.S. intelligence, the military and the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower not only were fully informed of Soviet planning to launch an earth satellite but also knew a Soviet satellite would probably achieve orbit no later than the end of 1957,” the C.I.A. said in a report released on Wednesday.

The declassified documents do not say that the agency knew Sputnik’s precise launch date, and the report takes pains to explain that C.I.A. warnings about the launch were “strategic” rather than “tactical.”

Still, the report suggests that the criticism endured at the time by top United States officials — including President Eisenhower himself — for apparently failing to predict the Soviets’ accomplishment might have been a little off the mark.

When Sputnik launched, the Cold War was about a decade old. So was the C.I.A. Both the Soviets and the Americans had been working on satellite technology for years. But President Eisenhower, concerned about the Soviet Union’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, was reluctant to invest military resources in a space race.

The Soviets, on the other hand, had a much better grasp of the power of propaganda, said Michael Khodarkovsky, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in Russia and the 20th century. He described “complete euphoria” in the Soviet Union after Sputnik launched.

“As a propaganda tool, it was just extraordinary,” he said in an interview on Thursday.

Sputnik was an aluminum sphere about the size of a beach ball — it was jammed full of communications equipment and weighed more than 180 pounds — with four spindly legs. It careered through space for three months, circling the Earth about every 100 minutes and emitting a regular pattern of beeps.

The front page of The New York Times on Oct. 5, 1957.

When Tass, the official Russian news agency, first broke the news about Sputnik — it was a Friday night in Washington — the Soviet Embassy in Washington was hosting a reception for rocket and satellite specialists.

The New York Times reported from the event that Lloyd Berkner, an American who was the president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, “beat on a glass” to get everyone’s attention.

“I wish to make an announcement,” he said. “I am informed by The New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.”

The Soviet scientists in the room were beaming.

The launch surprised and worried many Americans, including politicians who criticized President Eisenhower for failing to take the space race seriously.

“Eisenhower’s reaction to the Sputnik’s launch contrasted sharply with the reaction of the American public,” the C.I.A. said in the report that was released on Wednesday. “He remained calm, and his much-quoted claim on 9 October that Sputnik ‘does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota’ — although borne out by the record — was met with skepticism.”

That calm was a result of the president’s being well forewarned, the C.I.A. report continued, detailing a number of agency correspondences and memos that suggested a launch was expected by the fall of 1957. (It even cited one C.I.A. officer, Eloise Page, who narrowed it down to a span of two weeks.)

“In the lead-up to Sputnik’s launch, C.I.A.’s support to its most important customer — the president — provided accurate strategic warning,” the report said. “The president was not surprised.”

Dr. Khodarkovsky, whose Op-Ed about Sputnik appeared in The Times the day before the C.I.A. declassified its 59 documents, said he was surprised by the agency’s new revelations.

“It shows then how incredibly naïve the American administration was, not realizing the value of the whole thing,” he said of the Soviets’ propaganda victory. “And that’s worth emphasizing because I find the same naïveté, to say the least, now.”

He said the United States invested more in education and space exploration back then and gained the upper hand in space exploration — something he said the country could do today in fields like cybersecurity.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked off the Cold War space race as we know it, and the United States did recover from the Soviets’ early lead. An American satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in 1958, and American astronauts landed on the moon in 1969.

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Translations of Russian documents

"Announcement of the First Satellite," from Pravda, October 5, 1957

A Report On An Artificial Earth Satellite

A Report On the Feasibility of Development of an Artificial Earth Satellite

Synopsis of Report on Development of Conceptual Design of an Artificial Earth Satellite

Proposals of First Launches of Artificial Earth Satellites

Preliminary Considerations Of Prospective Work On The Development Of Outer Space 

United States response to the launch of the Soviet satellite

Replica of Sputnik 1

This article is part of a series about Dwight D. Eisenhower

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• Eisenhower Doctrine

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The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and anxiety in Western nations about the perceived technological gap between the United States and Soviet Union caused by the Soviets' launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite.[1] The crisis was a significant event in the Cold War that triggered the creation of NASA and the Space Race between the two superpowers. The satellite was launched on October 4, 1957, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This created a crisis reaction in national newspapers such as The New York Times, which mentioned the satellite in 279 articles between October 6, 1957, and October 31, 1957 (more than 11 articles per day).[2]

Background

In the early 1950s, Lockheed U-2 spy plane flights over the Soviet Union provided intelligence that the US held the advantage in nuclear capability.[3][4] However, an education gap was identified when studies conducted between 1955 and 1961 reported that the Soviet Union was training two to three times as many scientists per year as the US.[5] The launch and orbit of Sputnik 1 suggested that the Soviet Union had made a substantial leap forward in technology, which was interpreted as a serious threat to US national security, which spurred the US to make considerable federal investments in research and development, education, and national security.[3] The Juno I rocket that carried the first US satellite Explorer 1 had been ready to launch in 1956, but the fact was classified and unknown to the public.[6] The Army's PGM-19 Jupiter from which Juno was derived had been shelved on the orders of Defense Secretary Charles Erwin Wilson amid interservice rivalry with the US Air Force's PGM-17 Thor.[6]

Launch

Main article: Sputnik 1 § Launch and mission

The Soviets used ICBM technology to launch Sputnik into space, which gave them two propaganda advantages over the US at once: the capability to send the satellite into orbit and proof of the distance capabilities of their missiles.[7] That proved that the Soviets had rockets capable of sending nuclear weapons to Western Europe and even North America. That was the most immediate threat that Sputnik 1 posed. The United States, a land with a history of geographical security from European wars because of its distance, suddenly seemed vulnerable.

A contributing factor to the Sputnik crisis was that the Soviets had not released a photograph of the satellite for five days after the launch.[7] Until then, its appearance remained a mystery to Americans. Another factor was its weight of 184 pounds (83 kg), compared to US plans to launch a satellite of 21.5 pounds (9.8 kg).[7] The Soviet claim seemed outrageous to many American officials, who doubted its accuracy. US rockets then produced 150,000 pounds-force (670,000 N) of thrust, and US officials presumed that the Soviet rocket that launched Sputnik into space must have produced 200,000 pounds-force (890,000 N) of thrust. In fact, the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik 1 into space produced almost 1,000,000 pounds-force (4,400,000 N) of thrust.[7] All of those factors contributed to the Americans' perception that they were greatly behind the Soviets in the development of space technologies.

Beeps transmitted by Sputnik 1

The signals of Sputnik 1 continued for 22 days

Problems playing this file? See media help.

Hours after the launch, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Astronomy Department rigged an ad hoc interferometer to measure signals from the satellite.[1] Donald B. Gillies and Jim Snyder programmed the ILLIAC I computer to calculate the satellite orbit from this data. The programming and calculation was completed in less than two days. The rapid publication of the ephemeris (orbit) in the journal Nature within a month of the satellite launch helped to dispel some of the fears created by the Sputnik launch.[8] However, Sputnik was not part of an organized effort to dominate space according to a Soviet space scientist.[9]

The successful launch of Sputnik 1 and then the subsequent failure of the first two Project Vanguard launch attempts greatly accentuated the US perception of a threat from the Soviet Union that had persisted since the Cold War had begun after World War II. The same rocket that launched Sputnik could send a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, which would strip the Continental United States of its oceanic defenses. The Soviets had demonstrated that capability on 21 August by a 6,000-kilometer (3,700 mi) test flight of the R-7 booster. The event was announced by TASS five days later and was widely reported in other media.[10]

Eisenhower's reaction

Five days after the launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, US President Dwight Eisenhower addressed the American people. After being asked by a reporter on security concerns about the Soviet satellite, Eisenhower said, "Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota."[7]

Eisenhower made the argument that Sputnik was only a scientific achievement and not a military threat or change in world power. He believed that Sputnik's weight "was not commensurate with anything of great military significance, and that was also a factor in putting it in [proper] perspective".[7]

In 1958, Eisenhower declared three "stark facts" the United States needed to confront:

• The Soviets had surpassed America and the rest of the free world in scientific and technological advancements in outer space.
• If the Soviets maintained that superiority, they might use it as a means to undermine America's prestige and leadership.
• If the Soviets became the first to achieve significantly superior military capability in outer space and created an imbalance of power, they could pose a direct military threat to the US.[11]

Eisenhower followed this statement by saying that the United States needed to meet these challenges with "resourcefulness and vigor".[11] The president also noted the importance of education for the Russians in their recent scientific and technological progress, and for America's response to the Russians. He remarked, "we need scientists in the ten years ahead...scrutinize your school's curriculum and standards. Then decide for yourselves whether they meet the stern demands of the era we are entering."[12] His ability to project confidence about the situation was limited because his confidence was based on clandestine reconnaissance,[11] so he failed to quell the fears that there was a shift in power between the Americans and Soviets.[11] The launch of Sputnik 1 also impacted Eisenhower's ratings in his polls, but he eventually recovered.[7]

Media and political influences

Soviet stamp depicting Sputnik's orbit around Earth

The media stirred a moral panic by writing sensational pieces on the event. In the first and second days following the event, The New York Times wrote that the launch of Sputnik 1 was a major global propaganda and prestige triumph for Russian communism.[13] Further, Fred Hechinger, a noted American journalist and education editor, reported, “hardly a week passed without several television programs examining education".[14] It was after the people of the United States were exposed to a multitude of news reports that it became a "nation in shock".[13] The media not only reported public concern but also created the hysteria.[13] Journalists greatly exaggerated the danger of the Soviet satellite for their own benefit.[13] On October 9, 1957, the notable science fiction writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke said that the day that Sputnik orbited around the Earth, the US became a second-rate power.[13]

Politicians used the event to bolster their ratings in polls.[7] Research and development was used as a propaganda tool, and Congress spent large sums of money on the perceived problem of US technological deficiency.[15] After the launch of Sputnik 1 national security advisers overestimated the Soviets' current and potential rocket strength, which alarmed portions of Congress and the executive branch.[13] When these estimations were released, Eisenhower was forced into an accelerated missile race to appease those concerned with America's safety.[13] Sputnik provoked Congress into taking action on improving the US standing in the fields of science.

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, reflected on the event by saying, "It always sounded good to say in public speeches that we could hit a fly at any distance with our missiles. Despite the wide radius of destruction caused by our nuclear warheads, pinpoint accuracy was still necessary – and it was difficult to achieve."[7] At the time, Khrushchev stated that "our potential enemies cringe in fright".[7] The political analyst Samuel Lubell conducted research on public opinion about Sputnik and found "no evidence at all of any panic or hysteria in the public's reaction", which confirmed that it was an elite, not a popular, panic.[13]

Response

United States

The launch spurred a series of US initiatives[16] ranging from defense to education. Increased emphasis was placed on the US Navy's Project Vanguard to launch an American satellite into orbit. There was a renewed interest in the existing Explorer program, which launched the first American satellite into orbit on January 31, 1958.[17] In February 1958, Eisenhower authorized formation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was later renamed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), within the Department of Defense (DoD) to develop emerging technologies for the US military. On July 29, 1958, he signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, the creation of NASA.[16]

Less than a year after the Sputnik launch, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). It was a four-year program that poured billions of dollars into the US education system. In 1953, the government spent $153 million, and colleges took $10 million of that funding, but by 1960, the combined funding grew almost six-fold because of the NDEA.[18] After the initial public shock, the Space Race began, which led to the first human launched into space, Project Apollo, and the first humans to land on the Moon in 1969.[19]

Campaigning in 1960 on closing the "missile gap",[20] Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, promised to deploy 1,000 Minuteman missiles. That was many more ICBMs than the Soviets had at the time.[21] Though Kennedy did not favor a massive US manned space program when he was in the US Senate during Eisenhower's term, public reaction to the Soviet's launch of the first human into orbit, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961, led Kennedy to raise the stakes of the Space Race by setting the goal of landing men on the Moon. Kennedy claimed, "If the Soviets control space they can control the earth, as in past centuries the nation that controlled the seas dominated the continents."[15] Eisenhower disagreed with Kennedy's goal and referred to it as a "stunt".[7] Kennedy had privately acknowledged that the space race was a waste of money, but he knew there were benefits from a frightened electorate.[15] The Space Race was less about its intrinsic importance and more about prestige and calming the public.

The Sputnik crisis sparked the American drive to retake the lead in space exploration from the Soviets, and it fueled its drive to land men on the Moon.[11] American officials had a variety of opinions at the time, some registering alarm and others dismissing the satellite. Gerald Ford, a Republican US representative from Michigan, had stated, "We Middle Westerners are sometimes called isolationists. I don't agree with the label; but there can be no isolationists anywhere when a thermonuclear warhead can flash down from space at hypersonic speed to reach any spot on Earth minutes after its launching."[7] Former US Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett, chief of naval operations, stated that Sputnik was a "hunk of iron almost anybody could launch".[7]

The Sputnik crisis also spurred substantial transformation in the US science policy, which provided much of the basis for modern academic scientific research.[22] By the mid-1960s, NASA was providing almost 10% of the federal funds for academic research.[22]

Further expansion was made in the funding and research of space weapons and missile defense in the form of anti-ballistic missile proposals.[11] Education programs were initiated to foster a new generation of engineers and support was dramatically increased for scientific research.[23] Congress increased the National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriation for 1959 to $134 million, almost $100 million higher than the year before. By 1968, the NSF budget stood at nearly $500 million.

According to Marie Thorsten, Americans experienced a "techno-other void" after the Sputnik crisis and still express longing for "another Sputnik" to boost education and innovation. In the 1980s, the rise of Japan (both its car industry and its 5th generation computing project) served to fan the fears of a "technology gap" with Japan. After the Sputnik crisis, leaders exploited an "awe doctrine" to organize learning "around a single model of educational national security, with math and science serving for supremacy in science and engineering, foreign languages and cultures for potential espionage, and history and humanities for national self-definition".[This quote needs a citation] US leaders were not able to exploit the image of Japan as effectively, despite its representations of super-smart students and a strong economy.[24]

United Kingdom

In Britain, the launch of the first Sputnik provoked surprise, combined with elation at experiencing the dawn of the Space Age. It was also a reminder of the decline in the British Empire's world influence. The crisis soon became part of the broader Cold War narrative.[25]

See also

• International Geophysical Year
• New Math
• Timeline of events in the Cold War

References

1. ^ a b "Some History of the Department of Astronomy". University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archived from the original on 4 May 2007.
2. ^ "various articles, see link for the search". New York Times. Oct 6–31, 1957.
3. ^ a b Kay, Sean (April–May 2013). "America's Sputnik Moments". Survival. 55 (2): 123–146. doi:10.1080/00396338.2013.784470. S2CID 154455156.
4. ^ Bradley Lightbody (1999). The Cold War. Psychology Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-415-19526-3.
5. ^ Kaiser, David (2006). "The Physics of Spin: Sputnik Politics and American Physicists in the 1950s". Social Research. 73 (4): 1225–1252. doi:10.1353/sor.2006.0030.
6. ^ a b Macdougall, Ian (August 15, 2016). "The Leak Prosecution That Lost the Space Race". The Atlantic.
7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Mieczkowski, Yanek (2013). Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige. United States: Cornell University Press. pp. 11. ISBN 978-0-8014-5150-8.
8. ^ King, I. R.; McVittie, G. C.; Swenson, G. W.; Wyatt, S. P. (9 November 1957). "Further observations of the first satellite". Nature. 180 (4593): 943. Bibcode:1957Natur.180..943K. doi:10.1038/180943a0. S2CID 4273102.
9. ^ Isachenkov, Vladimir (1 October 2007). "Secrets of Sputnik Launch Revealed". USA Today. Associated Press. Archived from the original on 13 February 2014. Retrieved 13 February 2014.
10. ^ Harford, James (1997). "Korolev's Triple Play: Sputniks 1, 2, and 3, adapted from James J. Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon".
11. ^ a b c d e f Peoples, Columba (2008). "Sputnik and 'Skill Thinking' Revisited: Technological Determinism in American Responses to the Soviet Missile Threat". Cold War History. 8: 55–75. doi:10.1080/14682740701791334. S2CID 154436145.
12. ^ "Dwight Eisenhower - Speech to the Nation on the Future of American Security". www.americanrhetoric.com. Retrieved 2021-11-05.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
13. ^ a b c d e f g h McQuaid, Kim (2007). "Sputnik Reconsidered: Image and Reality in the Early Space Age". Canadian Review of American Studies. 37 (3): 371–401. doi:10.3138/cras.37.3.371. S2CID 159948737.
14. ^ Herold, J. (1974). SPUTNIK IN AMERICAN EDUCATION: A HISTORY AND REAPPRAISAL. McGill Journal of Education / Revue Des Sciences De l’éducation De McGill, 9(002)
15. ^ a b c DeGroot, Gerard (December 2007). "Sputnik 1957". American History.
16. ^ a b History Channel (2012a).
17. ^ Schefter (1999), pp. 25–26.
18. ^ Layman & Tompkins (1994), p. 190.
19. ^ DeNooyer (2007).
20. ^ Dickson (2003), pp. 5–6, 160–162.
21. ^ Dickson (2003), pp. 213–214.
22. ^ a b Geiger, Roger (1997). "What Happened After Sputnik? Shaping University Research in the United States". Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy.
23. ^ Totten, Michael (26 September 2013). "The Effects of the Cold War on us Education". Education Space 360. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 15 August 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
24. ^ Thorsten (2012), p. 74.
25. ^ Barnett, Nicholas (May 2013). "Russia Wins Space Race: The British Press and the Sputnik Moment, 1957" (PDF). Media History. 19 (2): 182–195. doi:10.1080/13688804.2013.791419. hdl:10026.1/9394. S2CID 142319531.

Bibliography

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• Burrows, William E. (1999). This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. New York: The Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-375-75485-2.
• Brzezinski, Matthew (2007). Red Moon Rising : Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. New York: Times Books. ISBN 9780805081473.
• Cadbury, Deborah (2006). Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and The Soviet Union for Dominion of Space. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 978-0-06-084553-7.
• Chaikin, Andrew (1994). A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-81446-6.
• Crompton, Samuel (2007). Sputnik/Explorer 1 : The Race to Conquer Space. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 9780791093573.
• Dickson, Paul (2003). Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group. ISBN 0-425-18843-4.
• Hardesty, Von; Eisman, Gene (2007). Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race. Foreword by Sergei Krushchev. Washington, D.C: National Geographic. ISBN 9781426201196.
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• DeNooyer, Rushmore (2007-11-06). "Sputnik Declassified". NOVA (Transcript). PBS. Archived from the original on 2012-10-09.
• "July 29: NASA Created". This Day in History. New York: History Channel. 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-10-08.
• "October 4: Sputnik launched". This Day in History. New York: History Channel. 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-10-09.
• Launius, Roger D. (2005). "Sputnik and the Origins of the Space Age". Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age. Washington, D.C.: NASA. Archived from the original on 2012-09-17.

External links

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