Word: sputnik
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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...Sputnik whirled serenely overhead, a startled world looked at Russia with new respect...
Part of the reaction was based on the presumption that if the Soviets could launch Sputnik, they had an intercontinental missile, or at least were ahead in the development of one. That presumption was far from an established fact. "Five hundred and sixty miles is only the distance from Bonn to Vienna," growled West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. "It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles." And even if Sputnik did imply Russian possession of an early version of an ICBM, the balance of atomic superiority still...
Khrushchev was deliberately casual about the satellite itself ("they phoned me and told me ... I congratulated the entire group of engineers and technicians on this outstanding achievement and calmly went to bed"), suggesting that the Sputnik was the least of the rocket wonders the Soviet had up its sleeve, and that in view of these the West's bombers and bases were already useless. "If you study our latest proposals, you will no longer find any mention of control posts at airfields ... It is useless to create control posts to watch obsolete airplanes." He developed the point with even...
...gained much scientific information from the satellite, but the rest of the world is beginning to catch up. Britain's 250-ft. radiotelescope at Jodrell Bank turned itself into an impromptu radar and pinpointed the satellite or its carrier rocket over Britain. As the slowly shifting orbit carried Sputnik over the east coast of the U.S., hundreds of early risers in New England saw the sunlit speck sweep across the predawn sky. Some saw two moving objects, the brighter of which was probably the carrier. Shot on film at Baltimore by WJZ-TV using a camera with a secret...
...Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, Mass, got a few accurate reports from Moonwatch teams that were organized to observe the still-grounded U.S. satellite. These data, digested in 21 seconds by a big computer at M.I.T., gave a pretty good orbit for the satellite. It is elliptical, carrying Sputnik to an apogee (high point) 583 miles above the earth and bringing it down to its perigee (low point) 143 miles up. Since both these distances are added to the radius of the earth (3,960 miles), the orbit is almost a circle, and a good indication that the Russian launching vehicle...