Word: sputniked
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...years to the day after the beeps of Sputnik I proclaimed the beginning of the space age, the U.S.S.R. celebrated the anniversary by announcing a far more advanced step into space: a rocket shot that this week sent a 600-lb. instrumented payload hurtling into space on a trajectory calculated to curve around the moon and swing back toward the earth. The moon probe (see SCIENCE) required a rocket thrust of at least 600,000 Ibs., twice the thrust of the U.S.'s most powerful rocket engine. The Soviet feat was all the more embarrassing to the U.S. because...
...Complacency. The U.S. can count up a dozen successful space shots of its own since Sputnik I, but in a broad view of the space-technology race, the U.S. has greater cause for alarm in October 1959 than it had in October 1957. Two years ago it seemed certain that the U.S., jolted out of complacency by Sput nik I, would proceed to catch up in a hurry. But the U.S. is still lagging behind...
...bigger price tag by the hour. "We always went big," says Schaerer, "and this was really big. But the school board didn't duck it." One bond referendum was defeated; but just before the next one in 1957 President Eisenhower spoke twice on television in a post-Sputnik appeal for more science education. That did it. St. Charles kicked in the money. Says Schaerer: "Never has a school district had a more talented and renowned speaker supporting...
Prestige Saved. After the war, J.P.L. developed the WAC Corporal and its successor, the Corporal E. Long before the Russians fired their Sputnik, J.P.L. had designed and had ready the spinning, clustered upper stages for an Army Redstone that the J.P.L. men insisted would put up a satellite. But not until the Navy's Vanguard fizzled on the sands of Cape Canaveral were they allowed to show what they could do-and redeemed U.S. prestige by flinging Explorer I into orbit. Since then, J.P.L.'s spinning clusters have launched three successful satellites, including the U.S. moon probe (Pioneer...
This made nine satellites circling the earth. Eight of them are American: three Vanguards, three Explorers, and two Discoverers. They range in weight from a 3.25-lb. instrumented Vanguard to an empty 1,700-lb. second stage of a Discoverer. The other is Russia's massive space body. Sputnik III (2,134 Ibs.); the other two Sputniks have fallen back into the atmosphere and burned up. Of the U.S. satellites, the grapefruit-sized Vanguard I is expected to keep circling for 2,000 years, the basketball-sized Vanguard II for 200 years. Both Vanguard I and Explorer VI have...