The Horror of Sputnik—and the Real Good It Did

On the night of October 4, 1957—50 years ago today—Americans watched with rapt attention and deep unease as a small, shiny point of light moved quickly across the night sky. Looking like a little shooting star, it was a tiny satellite launched that day by the Soviet Union. It was the first manmade object to reach space.  Sputnik, as it was called, a name meaning “companion,” orbited the earth once every 96 minutes and emitted sound signals at regular intervals from the two radios it carried. Those bleeps, used to monitor Sputnik’s location and progress, sounded as an alarm bell to Americans. The Russians were demonstrating in the most public possible way that they were ahead of the United States in claiming space. This shocked and terrified Americans.

The country was obviously losing its technological edge in the standoff with the USSR. Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the future President, called Sputnik a “second Pearl Harbor.” The historical evidence suggests that this panicked reaction was largely baseless, but it did serve to spur America on in the space race and spark a concerted drive to improve the country’s engines of research and learning.

Sputnik’s flight was the product of years of Soviet engineering led by a scientist named Sergei Korolev. Known to his colleagues by the cryptic title of “Chief Designer,” Korolev was relentless in his drive to beat the United States into space. Having combed the wreckage of Hitler’s Germany to learn as much as possible about the Third Reich’s rocketry programs, Korolev had returned to the USSR at the beginning of the Cold War determined to lead his country’s scientists to dominance. The program he ran was not entirely public, but neither was it a very well kept secret. The Russian government announced numerous times that it would send a satellite into space. Signs of Sputnik’s forthcoming launch had been so plainly visible to attentive observers that one historian has remarked, “Sputnik I was an astonishing development only for the uninformed”—adding that the uninformed included much of Congress and the media.

Korolev certainly succeeded in mounting a spectacular show for the USSR and striking fear into the hearts of Americans. But the success of Sputnik—and of Sputnik II, a more impressive satellite, weighing half a ton, launched just a month later—energized an American reaction that ultimately proved very damaging to the Russian empire. In the Winter 2004 issue of American Heritage of Invention and Technology, T. A. Heppenheimer argues that Sputnik’s launch and orbit set a precedent allowing a country’s satellites to fly over the airspace of its enemies. Had the United States launched the first satellite, Heppenheimer says, it could have provoked a confrontation with the Kremlin. Instead, the USSR ensured that the U.S. could eventually make extensive use of spy satellites. In 1957, though, the hope of such future developments was small consolation to scientists like Wernher Von Braun, the former engineer of Hitler’s V2 rockets, who was supervising the nascent American space program at the time.

A reorganization of the American space initiative quickly followed. Both Truman and Eisenhower had failed to see the full potential of satellites, either as spy tools or as demonstrations of strength. In 1955 James Killian, Jr., the president of MIT, had headed the government Technological Capabilities Panel that recommended that the government focus on missile development rather than space technology. The government had responded accordingly, and when the American people reacted with horror to Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration protested that the U.S. could have reached space first, but its priorities had lain elsewhere. After that momentous day in October, the public would insist on an energetic space program.

On October 1, 1958, just a year after Sputnik’s flight, the U.S. government established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, to supervise the American space effort. Though it struggles today to maintain its importance, NASA’s victories of the 1960s and ’70s, including the first successful moon landing, far overshadowed the memory of Sputnik and catapulted American science to an unprecedented level of worldwide prestige.

Even outside the realm of military and space technology, the United States reacted to Sputnik with vigor and determination. Politicians in Congress, particularly Johnson and Senator John F. Kennedy, used it as an opportunity to undercut President Eisenhower’s popularity by advancing an agenda focusing on science and education. Their National Defense Education Act passed in 1958. It set aside the long-fought debate over whether the federal government had the right to fund education, and it subsidized loans and fellowships for college students while providing new incentives for young people to become teachers.

Spending on research increased dramatically, both in the government and at government-supported universities. In 1953, basic research constituted .12 percent of the gross national product. By 1968, after both Kennedy and Johnson had served in the White House, that figure had more than tripled to .38 percent. As NASA strove to increase America’s technological stature, powerful leaders ensured that young people inspired by the space program would have the resources and training to serve their country as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

In retrospect, some reactions to the great event of October 4, 1957, seem terribly overblown. One British newspaper carried the headline “Next Stop Mars?” This panicked response reveals just how deeply threatened Western nations felt in the aftermath of such an obvious Russian triumph. But rather than succumbing to fear, the United States turned its attention to the task of training a new generation of scientific minds and achieving a new level of technological advancement. It succeeded at both.