Word: sputniked
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...from speeding up, in fact, Vanguard lagged behind its original plan for a late-1957 launching of a 20-odd-lb. satellite (less than one-eighth as heavy as Russia's claim for Sputnik). The stretched-out schedule calls for launching smaller test satellites late this year, orbiting the first 21½-lb. ball next spring. The satellites themselves are ready to soar, reports Vanguard's softspoken, pipe-puffing Director John P. Hagen. But the launching vehicle is still undergoing tests. Its first stage, an adaptation of the Navy's Viking, has to work perfectly...
After the Russians got their Sputnik into its orbit, an Administration official said he felt an urge to "strangle" Budget Director Percival Brundage. But the Administration has budgeted for Vanguard all the funds that the men who run the project asked for ($110 million so far). And that stock villain, interservice rivalry, did not slow up the project, according to Vanguard scientists. In fact, the scientists, from Dr. Hagen down, insist that Vanguard has not failed, that it will reach its basic goal of orbiting a satellite before...
...midst of the cold war, Vanguard's cool scientific goal proved to be disastrously modest: the Russians got there first. The post-Sputnik White House explanation that the U.S. was not in a satellite "race" with Russia was not just an after-the-fact alibi. Said Dr. Hagen ten months ago: "We are not attempting in any way to race with the Russians." But in the eyes of the world, the U.S. was in a satellite race whether it wanted to be or not, and because of the Administration's costly failure of imagination, Project Vanguard shuffled along...
...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...