Technology

"The Space Race"

The Space Age dawned on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit around the earth. Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite around earth. (Sputnik is a Russian word meaning "traveler.") Until this point, it had been assumed that the first satellite would be American, not Russian. As Sputnik ushered in the beginning of the space age, many Americans reacted with astonishment. President Eisenhower tried to downplay the situation, even though he had been warned as early as 1955 that "severe psychological shock" would result if the Soviet Union won the race to orbit.

While Americans tried to make sense of the situation, the Soviet Union followed up on its initial success with the launch of Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. Inside Sputnik 2 was a pressurized compartment containing a dog named Laika, who was the first passenger to orbit earth.

A look back at Sputnik

In the United States, Project Vanguard was the program initiated in September of 1955 to provide a launch vehicle for artificial satellites. Despite attempts to speed it up after the launch of Sputnik, it proceeded slowly. The first real test of the system did not take place until October 23, 1957, about three weeks after Sputnik 1 reached orbit. Americans anxiously waited for and artificial satellite to call their own. Their opportunity can on December 6, 1957, which was the launch date of the first fully operational Vanguard rocket. However, soon after ignition, the booster settled back onto the launch pad, toppled over, and exploded. Two months later, a second Vanguard veered off course after a launch and broke up in the atmosphere.

Until this point, the United States military had not gotten involved because Eisenhower thought that space exploration should be a purely scientific endeavor. However, the unexpected launch of Sputnik 1 changed all this. Within a few weeks after launch, the Army got the go ahead for a satellite program. Using a modified Jupiter rocket booster, the Army worked quickly to prepare. On January 31, 1958, the Juno 1 launched America's first satellite into orbit, the Explorer 1.

To respond to the budding Soviet space program, President Eisenhower turned to a small scientific agency called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautic (NACA), which had made many contribution to aircraft design. On July 27, 1958 Eisenhower signed legislation transforming NACA into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NASA was designed to operate separately from the Department of Defense and was also required by its 1958 charter to make its research available to the American public. Through the years, NASA developed its own rockets, spacecraft, and communications networks.

NASA homepage

Reaching for the Moon

Even after the United States got its first spacecraft into orbit, the lead remained with the Soviets. In 1959, the Soviet space program began its attempts to reach the moon. The Soviets launched the unmanned Luna 2 on September 12, 1959, which then struck the moon 35 hours later. Luna 3 was sent toward the moon on October 4, 1959 and returned photographs of the moon's far side three day later. The Soviet Luna series dropped of for about three years, and returned in 1963 with the goal of placing instrumented capsules onto the lunar surface. The first five attempts, and perhaps a sixth, were failures. However, the first to succeed was the Luna 9 which left earth on January 31, 1966, and dropped its round capsule on the lunar surface three days later.

The American program to reach the moon was the Apollo program. Apollo 8 was launched using the powerful Saturn 5 booster on December 21, 1968. It took three days for Apollo to reach the moon, and then orbited the moon. The Apollo 11 mission was the first lunar landing. Nearly a million people jammed Cape Kennedy roads for a view of the July 16, 1969 launch. The Eagle was the lunar landing module aboard which were Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Project Apollo

Soviet Lunar Missiona

ICBM Testing

InterContinental Balistic MIssles were a new range of weaponary that both the United States and The Soviet Union were developing during the Cold War. In the United States, the MX (missle experimental) program was developed in the early 70's. Before then, the U.S. Military believed that the Soviets were dramatically improving on the accuracy and number of missle systems. They thought that the Soviets could attack, even destroy, the concrete missile silos in which U.S. ICBM's were being held.

The US felt that they needed a way to deploy the missles that would be invulnerable to Soviet attack. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter began a full-scale development of the MX but could not resolve the issue of deployment. The invulnerability of the MX would not be achieved. Jimmy Carter developed a deployment plan in which 200 ICBM would be mounted on movable launchers. Those launchers would be underground in a system of tunnels that lead to 4,600 shelters. At any one time, 4,400 shelters would be empty so if attacked, the chances that a missle would be destroyed would be slim. President Reagen saw how this plan would be very expensive and so he went with a plan of placing the missles deep underground, making them invulnerable to Soviet attack.

In the end, neither of these plans would be implemented but in 1985, Congress passed a program that would deploy 50 MX missiles in fixed silos. However in 1992, the arm-reduction talks between Bush and Yeltsin resulted in the removal of all land-based missiles.

Here is some declassified newsreal of ICBM Testing

Testing #1

Testing #2

Testing #3

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