What western science owes the launch of sputnik

Various: Fifty years ago on October 4, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first artificial satellite to reach orbit. As New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford reports "nothing would ever quite be the same--in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species."

As Carl Welser recounts, when he heard Sputnik-1 on the radio, there was no "beep" that is frequently played in the documentaries, just a few seconds of "hiss-hiss-hiss" as Sputnik passed over St. Louis, MI. Only when his radio operator turned on a beat frequency oscillator, which converted the hisses into a few fading beeps did the tell tale signal appear. It was a trick used by Morse code operators to send a signal signal using a simple continuous wave an extrmely long distance.

The simple message that amateur radio operators could pick up plunged the West, particularly the US, into a crisis of self-confidence over the capability of scientists and engineers. As historian Alex Roland, space policy analyst John M. Logsdon tell Wilford, if the first satellite had been launched by Americans, it would have merely confirmed their reputation for technological superiority and “there would probably not have been Apollo.” But as William J. Broad points out, from the start, the space race was an arms race.

Nearly all the major expansion in the physics community can be tied to this one event (see the statistical research reports at the American Institute of Physics) as Cornelia Dean recounts in When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class. Gary Anthes at Computer World looks at the impact Sputnik has had on the computer industry, the vast computational demands of the space program helped dramatically reduce the cost of mainframe computers and provided large incentives to develop innovative integrated circuit designs. It also pushed the creation of Advanced Research Projects Agency, now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Wilford reviews as part of his New York Times story some of the books and movies that recount the glory days of the Appollo program such as the new documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" and Walter A. McDouagll's 1985 book "The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age." Reporter Claudia Dreifus also asks scientists and others who lived through it (and a few who were yet to be born) to reflect on what Sputnik meant to them

John Schwartz also looks in the New York Times at what the next fifty years might hold in terms of spaceflight, and Mike O'Sullivan at Voice of America attended a meeting of scientists and engineers at Caltech last week to talk about milestones of the past and future possibilities for space exploration.