Sputnik 1

The first satellite in history was not the satellite they meant to launch.

Object D was the plan: a tonne or more of spacecraft, hundreds of kilograms of scientific instruments, ordered by decree, five industrial ministries on the hook for it. It fell behind, and the rocket engines came in under spec, so the Chief Designer put it aside and substituted a polished metal ball with nothing in it at all. On 4 October 1957 the fallback went up on a rocket that malfunctioned the whole way, and the twentieth century changed shape.

This Turbo History short tells Sputnik straight, from a committee resolution about surveying the Earth to the night a room full of the world's best geophysicists stood on a roof in Washington and saw nothing:

• Why Washington chose the slower rocket on purpose, and the legal argument that made being second worth it
• The man whose name was a state secret, who answered a request for seventy or eighty staff by scribbling that thirty five would do, and who got his launch by threatening to send the question upstairs
• What was actually inside the sphere: three batteries, two transmitters, a fan, and not one scientific instrument
• The beep that carried no message, no code and no targeting data, whatever was said about it at the time
• Why almost nobody who watched Sputnik cross the sky was watching Sputnik
• The rest of 1957, from Ghana and the Treaty of Rome to paratroopers outside a school in Arkansas

The American public was astonished. American intelligence had spent a year predicting exactly this and was not. That gap is where the legend lives.

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