Government Computer News
Tom Temin | Editor's Desk: How 9/11 recalls days of Sputnik
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Thomas R. Temin
Though few had heard of him at the time, Korolev was chief designer of Sputnik, the bewhiskered satellite that streaked across the skies in late 1957. So far as we know, he was a powerful competitor to, but not a personal enemy of, the United States. A victim of Stalin’s gulags for six years of his life, Korolev had little reason to thwart the United States, other than scientific satisfaction.
Many events in the intervening decades seared themselves powerfully onto our collective memory, but few had the lasting impact of Sputnik. 9/11 is one of them. The parallels are instructive.
The launch of that first artificial satellite shocked the United States out of its prosperous, postwar torpor. To this day, the word “Sputnik” encodes a generation’s preoccupation with East-West military rivalry, fascination with science and pursuit of the space race.
Though it merely gathered and transmitted ionosphere data, Sputnik created a sense of threat. Maybe the next thing the USSR launched would be an atom bomb missile aimed at Washington, people thought. After all, Sputnik’s launch rocket was also used for Soviet ballistic missiles.
Khrushchev’s crowing that Sputnik was merely a grapefruit didn’t help.
No bigger than a basketball, Sputnik managed to provoke vast changes in governmental policy and spending. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA, a new bureaucracy with a new mission.
In the compressed retrospective of 1958 to the July 20, 1969, first moon landing, it seems as if NASA’s accomplishments followed an unfailing trajectory toward success and American technical superiority. In fact NASA, and the Air Force, encountered many sputters and failed launches early on in the space race.
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