Sixty years ago this month a small silver orb made the first-ever orbit of planet Earth.
On the night of 4 October 1957 an R7 ‘Semyorka’ rocket launched from the Tyuratam missile range (now Baikonur Cosmodrome) in Kazakhstan. The 83kg satellite it delivered into orbit would change the world forever. As Sputnik transmitted its monotonous series of beeps to the world below, it announced the beginning of the Space Age.
Sputnik was a major scientific milestone, but it also had a massive political impact. The fact that this breakthrough had been made by the Soviet Union terrified the West and opened up a new front in the Cold War.
The satellite’s origins lay in the arms race that followed the Second World War. After the Americans had dropped their atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets quickly developed a nuclear weapon of their own – but with no long-range bombers and no airstrips anywhere in range of the US, they had no way to deliver it. What they needed was a missile; a missile 10 times more powerful than anything that had been built before.
To build this missile Stalin appointed Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, a talented aeronautical engineer who would become the chief designer of the entire Soviet space programme. Korolev was undoubtedly the right man to build the missile, but he wasn’t really interested in warfare. He was interested in space exploration and from earliest of the days of the missile programme he was preparing to send his rockets into orbit.
By the mid 1950s the Soviets were working on a satellite named Object D. The plan was to launch it in 1957, as part of the International Geophysical Year. It would weigh over a tonne and would carry instruments to study the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, as well as the solar wind and cosmic rays.
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