HARDCORE UFOs Pt II: 50 Years After Sputnik
by Michael Louie

This day is the fiftieth anniversary of sending a tiny, fragile sphere into space. It’s important to remember that, amongst the 20/20 hindsight of just what Sputnik launched into the frontiers of military and civilian imaginations, it burned up and disintegrated ninety days later.

On October 5, 1957, Soviet newspapers dutifully reported the launch of Sputnik 1 in calm and clinical language. That morning’s edition of Pravda stated: “As a result of very intensive work by scientific research institutes and design bureaus the first artificial satellite in the world has been created. On October 4, 1957, this first satellite was successfully launched in the USSR [. . .] At the present time the satellite is describing elliptical trajectories around the Earth, and its flight can be observed in the rays of the rising and setting Sun with the aid of very simple optical instruments.” The Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, informed of the launch by telephone while visiting the Ukraine, later wrote that he “congratulated the entire group of engineers and technicians on this outstanding achievement and calmly went to bed.”

The rest of the stunned world, namely Russia’s then-chief rival, the United States, matched the Soviets’ stoicism (a style now found in more commonly from news reports emanating from the Chinese government) with blasting banner headlines, all capitals and italics, heralding the achievement in terms that may have been more appropriate for one of their own. SOVIETS FIRE EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE EARTH AT 18,000 M.P.H.; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSING IN U.S. As the U.S. wondered aloud at the implications for the future of the Cold War, and that of man himself, reactions on the other side of the Pacific were almost nonchalant in their modesty. “[Sputnik’s launch] was seen as one more thing in Soviet technical progress, one more achievement,” Sergei N. Khrushchev, the premier’s son, said in an interview with the New York Times. “It was one more thing for us and we were proud, but it was a shock for the United States.”

It’s possible the younger Khrushchev’s perspective on such a monumental event was bred less out of (what was perceived) as Soviet arrogance during a mounting Cold War, and more out of allegience to the Soviet leadership’s own subdued reaction: perhaps the elder Khrushchev had not known exactly what his scientists had wrought. The premier was not even notified of Sputnik’s success until its second orbit around the Earth was over, nearly 200 minutes after the satellite was released into its ellipse. It wasn’t until Sputnik had garnered such international attention the following day that the Russian government decided to make headlines of their own. “We must make big noise about this,” Sergei recalled his father saying. “Yes, big noise.”

Russia got its propaganda machine rolling the next day, with Pravda’s belated headline, “World’s First Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Nation.” The paper’s coverage ranged from maps of Sputnik’s orbital crossings above Russia and the United States to poetry dedicated to the satellite. What was missing was the who? of the journalistic equation: the parties responsible for Sputnik’s success were not named, instead cloaked under somewhat inelegant titles like Chief Designer of Rocket-Space Systems and Chief Theoretician of Cosmonautics, or simply not named at all. According to a report laboriously titled Soviet Space Programs, 1962-65; Goals and Purposes, Achievements, Plans, and International Implications, Prepared for the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, Premier KhrushchevKhrushchevKhrushchev promised that the scientists’ identities would be revealed in due time. But, “in order to ensure the country’s security and lives of these scientists, engineers, technicians, and other specialists, we cannot yet make known their names or publish their photographs.”