Word: sputniked
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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...
...Lower the Faster. As Sputnik entered its second week, there was no evidence that it was losing altitude, but its carrier seemed to be feeling the strain. The carrier is probably a large, empty cylinder with a lot of air resistance for its weight, so the thin air at orbit level takes more energy from it. But as the carrier loses energy to the air, it does not lose speed. It spirals down to a lower orbit and speeds up. The nearer an orbiting body is to the earth, the faster it must move. The earth's natural moon...
...apogee of its original orbit and increased its speed by about 20 m.p.h. This put it far ahead of the satellite proper, and made it spiral lower. There it could be getting hot from air friction, but it would probably last for at least two more weeks. Until Sputnik itself shows signs of dropping or speeding up, its date of fiery death cannot be predicted. Dr. John P. Hagen, chief of the U.S. satellite program, thinks that Sputnik will stay up there for more than a year...