Scientific Marvel Or Political Hail Mary?

It struck awe around the world and fear around the Pentagon. Fifty years ago this Thursday, Russia launched the first tiny probe that ignited a decades-long space race -- Sputnik.

Roughly the size of a basketball, the antenna-spiked sphere was, in 1957, the first man-made object ever hurled into Earth orbit. It was touted as the pinnacle of Soviet scientific achievement, an early win in the space race.

Or was it?

"The key reason behind the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Boris Chertok tells the Associated Press. He's 95-years old now. But in 1957, Chertok was one of the two fathers of Sputnik. "The military missile was the main thing we were thinking of at the moment."

Indeed, the cold war was near its zenith. The focus of Soviet military technology was getting a missile-borne hydrogen bomb over the United States. The Soviets had the rocket -- the R-7. With plenty of thrust (the Russians hadn't yet figured out the warhead configuration for their hydrogen bomb, so they weren't sure how much it would weigh), but they as yet had no payload.

That gave Chertok and scientist Sergei Korolyov a unique opportunity. The Kremlin had a rocket. And, since the military couldn't come up with a weapon payload right away, Chertok and Korolyov rummaged through their storehouse of ideas for a space satellite. Sure, they had one on the drawing board, but they needed something much quicker. So they formed a team that quickly came up with PS-1 -- "Prosteishiy Sputnik-1." Literally, it was the Simplest Satellite.

In three months, they had a working model. PS-1 was a round sphere of polished aluminum. Inside, the sphere contained a radio transmitter.

Chertok remembers his boss, Korolyov, telling him, "The Earth is a sphere, and its first satellite also must have a spherical shape."

Inside, the pressurized sphere contained a radio transmitter. Outside, Sputnik was surrounded by four long antennae.

Sputnik was originally set to launch on October 6, 1957. But Korolyov was worried that the US was moving up its plans for a missile launch, all evidence pointing to the contrary. So he canceled some last-minute tests and put the tiny satellite on the launch pad atop its R-7 rocket.

"Better than anyone else Korolyov understood how important it was to open the space era," 76-year old Georgy Grechko tells the AP. Back then he was a rocket scientist. Later, he became a cosmonaut. "The Earth had just one moon for a billion years and suddenly it would have another, artificial moon!"

Important, indeed. Slow to grasp the monumental importance of Sputnik's feeble radio beeps, Korolyov's team realized what they'd done inside a week.

"At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done," Chertok tells the wire service. "We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok. Only four or five days later did we realize that it was a turning point in the history of civilization."

Did your folks ever tell you of lying in the grass that fall, watching Sputnik as it circled the planet every 98 minutes?

The were wrong. Instead, they were watching the spent second-stage booster, which was in roughly the same orbit. Sputnik was far too small to see with the naked eye.

The Kremlin was quickly thrilled. Premier Nikita Khrushchev quickly ordered Korolyov to send up another satellite -- and he wanted it orbiting the Earth in less than a month to mark the November 17, 1917 Communist revolution.

Korolyov complied. His team worked 'round the clock to come up with Sputnik-2, a much larger spacecraft with a pressurized cabin. It launched November 3, 1957, carrying the first Earth creature into orbit -- a mixed-breed dog named Laika. That animal died of heat exhaustion in the capsule a few days after launch.

Sputnik-1 stopped beeping three weeks after its launch. Its orbit decayed and it burned up in the atmosphere after three weeks. But with the International Space Station now circling the Earth and manned missions being planned for both the Moon and Mars, its creation and its legacy are well worth remembering.

FMI: www.nasa.gov