Sputnik 1 was the Soviet Union's quick backup plan, and it changed history
The first artificial satellite was never meant to be first. Soviet engineers had planned a heavy science laboratory, but it fell behind schedule, and fear of an American launch pushed them to throw together a simple beeping ball instead. That stopgap, Sputnik 1, went up on 4 October 1957 and started the Space Race.
Sergei Korolev pitched a satellite to the defence ministry in December 1954. When President Eisenhower announced in July 1955 that the United States would orbit one during the International Geophysical Year, a Soviet physicist declared four days later that his country would too. The original design, called Object D, was to weigh over a tonne and carry hundreds of kilograms of instruments. By late 1956 the instruments were lagging and the R-7 engines were slightly weaker than hoped, so the launch slipped to 1958. Object D eventually flew as Sputnik 3.
Korolev's bureau proposed something far plainer: roughly 100 kilograms with a radio transmitter and little else, approved in February 1957 under a name meaning elementary satellite. It needed a rocket. The R-7 had been designed as an intercontinental missile, deliberately overpowered because nobody knew how heavy the hydrogen bomb it would carry might be. Its first test flights caught fire, failed to launch or went into a roll and crashed. Success came in August and September, and Korolev persuaded officials to lend the next rocket to the satellite.
What reached orbit was a polished sphere 58 centimetres across, trailing four antennas. It circled the planet every 96.2 minutes at about 8 kilometres per second, on a tilted path that crossed almost every inhabited region. Radio amateurs worldwide picked up its signals until the batteries died after 22 days. Even silent, it was useful: the drag on its orbit revealed the density of the upper atmosphere, and its radio pulses had already probed the ionosphere. On 4 January 1958, after 1,440 orbits and some 70 million kilometres, it burned up.
The name carries its own irony. Sputnik, coined in the 18th century, literally means fellow traveller, the same phrase Westerners had used since the 1930s as an insult for communist sympathisers.
Source: Sputnik 1
