n October 4, 1957, the 84-kg Object PS 1, as the Soviet Union called it - or Sputnik 1, as everyone else called it - rode a modified R-7 ICBM into space and into global headlines.
What happened next? Many momentous things.
R7 and Sputnik display at Museum of Flight (Matt Bille)
The Sputnik program's creator was Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, leader of Soviet long-range missile and space programs. Despite having done an undeserved and almost fatal stretch in a gulag for "sabotage," he was a Russian patriot who, like his counterpart Wernher von Braun (of whom he once wistfully said, "We should be friends"), had one eye on missiles and one on spaceflight. (No one outside the USSR knew who Korolev was.)
Korolev had an explicit commission to beat the United States to the first satellite. He was spurred on by a belief that a US Jupiter-C reentry vehicle test flight was a failed satellite attempt. When the initial satellite design, "Object D," was initially too big and unreliable to launch in 1957, Korolev's right-hand man, Mikhail Tikhonravov, suggested they instead fly the simplest possible satellite. The lead designer of the satellite itself was Nikolai Kutyrkin. The launch was a success, and Sputnik 1's famous "beep" - described by LIFE magazine as "a cricket with a cold" - was heard worldwide. (Object D later become Sputnik 3.)
As Korolev congratulated his comrades, saying, "The road to the stars is now open!"
Read about it here:
https://www.amazon.com/First-Space-Race-Satellites-Centennial/dp/1585443743
Matt Bille is a writer in Colorado Springs, his next book, scientific thriller Apex Predator, can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.com/Apex-Predator-Matt-Bille/dp/B0H7FHQJYY
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