The first artificial satellite to reach orbit was a moon made of bricks, in fiction
Eighty-eight years before Sputnik, the American writer Edward Everett Hale published The Brick Moon, a story about launching a man-made moon into orbit. Isaac Newton had already sketched the physics in 1687, imagining a cannonball fired so fast it kept falling around the Earth forever. The real thing finally flew on 4 October 1957.
Between the story and the launch came a string of thinkers. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked out in 1903 how fast a craft must travel to stay in a low orbit and argued that a multistage liquid-fuel rocket could get there. Herman Potocnik described orbiting observation posts in 1928, and in a 1945 magazine article Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that three satellites parked in geostationary orbit could relay communications to the entire planet. A 1946 RAND report predicted that an instrumented satellite would be among the century's most potent scientific tools.
Sputnik 1, designed under Sergei Korolev, did useful science despite its simplicity: tracking how its orbit changed revealed the density of the upper atmosphere, and its radio signals probed the ionosphere. Its surprise success set off a panic in the United States and the space race. The American reply, Explorer 1, rose on 31 January 1958, and its radiation detector uncovered the Van Allen belts. Canada, Australia and Italy all built early satellites but launched them on American rockets; France, in 1965, was the third nation to reach orbit with its own launcher.
Mass production changed everything. In 1961 the US tracking network counted 115 satellites. The HS-333 of 1972 introduced the standard satellite bus, a common platform reused across missions, and tiny CubeSats followed. By 28 June 2025 there were 12,952 satellites circling Earth, 8,530 of them American. Crowding has raised collision risks, so many new satellites, such as Starlink's, are built to burn up completely when they fall.
Materials are getting creative too. Japan's space agency and NASA have developed LingoSat, a prototype satellite made of wood, after sending timber samples into space in 2021 to test how it held up.
Source: Satellite
