The Big Beep

"The Russians, Conquerors of Space. Oct.4, 1957. I have just heard some news which will affect my whole future. Russia has just successfully launched the first man-made satellite into space…How did the Russians do it? Out of their own ingenuity? Did they get information from a spy in America? A traitor? All the work our scientists and top brains did, what for? Will the Russians take advantage of this and use it to start a war?"

I wrote that, in my brown notebook, just minutes after I heard the news--after in fact I heard the actual beeps from Sputnik in orbit, as broadcast on the radio.  Sixty years ago tonight.



I was 11. So was Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Steven Speilberg would turn 11 in a couple of months. George Lucas was 13. Sputnik changed our lives, in some ways encouraging our dreams of the future, but also introduced a new dose of fear.

I was in my room, ostensibly doing my homework.  At the end of a long, multi-jointed arm, a green-shaded lamp focused light on the surface of the heavy, dark-grained wood desk, a hand-me-down undoubtedly older than I was. The rest of my room was in shadow.

Maybe I actually was doing my homework.  But that brown notebook also contained the text and drawings of my latest science fiction effort, "The Desert Menace." Anyway, I was engrossed in my pool of light, so when my bedroom door flew open I was startled. My father leaned in, and asked me if I’d been listening to the radio. I said “no” defensively, but he wasn’t checking on my homework diligence. He said the Russians had launched a satellite into space. It was orbiting the earth right now.  My parents were in the living room, watching television.  It was such an important event that a news flash had interrupted network programming.

Alone again, I reached up and to the right to my bookshelf, and switched my radio on.  My father had put it together from a kit.  It had a slate gray face but its works behind were exposed. (That radio looked like this one.  It may even have been a "Space Scanner.")

 It was supposed to be a short wave set but despite its impressive dials, it seldom pulled in anything farther than the local AM station, WHJB.  "Nightwatch" was my favorite program, with a mysterious instrumental opening--a song I heard almost every night but have never heard since. Eventually that station played a recording of the beep.

A lot of people were shocked.  The very idea of orbiting a satellite in space was nothing but silly science fiction to them.  I was used to the idea from, well, the silly science fiction I watched and read.  But I was also a little better informed.

I knew about IGY--the International Geophysical Year.  I probably learned about it from a Young Catholic Messenger article (a periodical we got at school) that dramatized the upcoming first satellite launch during this year of globally shared geophysical research.  Only this was supposed to be a United States launch in 1958, climaxing the IGY.

I'd also seen a television documentary on the IGY.  A newsman was interviewing none other than Charles van Doren about it.  Van Doren had the reputation of being the smartest man in the country because he was a quiz show champion.  When the newsman asked van Doren if the Russians might orbit a satellite first, he just chuckled.  (Van Doren of course became the most famous quiz show contestant to be exposed as having been given the answers.)

But the Russians had done it first and the news and shock rippled around the country. The news of Sputnik had spread quickly first in government and scientific circles earlier that day. Around 6:30 PM on the East Coast, President Dwight Eisenhower was at Camp David when he was told. It was just a few minutes after 8 PM in New York when RCA technicians recorded the sound. Sputnik had already orbited over the U.S. three times by then.

NBC News broke into radio and TV programming coast to coast. “Listen now for the sound,” the radio announcer said, “which forevermore separates the old from the new.” (The announcement did not, as some stories say, break into broadcast of the World Series. October 4, 1957 was a travel day for the Yankees and Milwaukee Braves--no game was played. Besides, night games in the World Series didn't begin until 1971.)

It was rush hour on the West Coast. Commuters might have been listening to Jimmie Rodgers sing “Honeycomb,” the current number one hit, or the song it dethroned, “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. When they first heard the Sound.

We're now told that people in the know in Washington were expecting it, and that Eisenhower’s military people welcomed it, specifically because they wanted to spy on the Russians from space, and now the Russians could hardly object when the U.S. sent a satellite over their country.  They sure didn't seem happy about it at the time.

Sputnik specifically changed the lives of my generation.  Apart from increasingly delusional 'duck and cover' drills, it started a national fervor over science education and education in general, parodied for our generation by the Firesign Theatre pitting Communist Martyrs High School against More Science High.

It also led to the National Defense Education Act, which provided the first federal loans for college, which is how many of us got there.  It was in fact one of the historical breaks that allowed a working class kid like me to go to college, or at least to have some choice of which I'd go to.

But the Cold War fear and alarm I'd expressed in my notebook was about more than a spy in the sky.  People immediately thought of being bombed from space. Though that wasn't literally possible, there was some truth to it.

This was 1957, little more than a decade after the first atomic bombs. Although the U.S. had exploded the first true hydrogen bomb in 1952, it was too large and fragile for a weapon. The bomb the Soviets designed and exploded the next year was not as powerful, but it was already a weapon. The U.S. soon had created usable hydrogen bombs, but the Soviets had a brief advantage which had shaken the military establishment.

Now it seemed the Soviets had leaped ahead and were a much greater threat. Until then, an attack on the U.S. or Russia could be conducted only by using bombers. Although the U.S. was rapidly developing guided missiles, Sputnik (and especially the bigger and heavier Sputnik II launched a month later) proved the Soviets had built missiles capable of reaching the U.S. and delivering atomic bombs.

Missiles were much more of a threat--they were faster than bombers and harder to detect. Airplanes could be shot down, but not guided missiles. They didn't have to be particularly accurate, because hydrogen bombs were so powerful they didn’t have to be delivered to precise targets. To destroy New York or Moscow might require as many as 24 atomic bombs. The first hydrogen bombs were each as powerful as a thousand Hiroshima bombs. New York could be destroyed by one of them, which would also produce radiation lethal to the population of Washington, D.C., and would contaminate most of the Northeast, into Canada. The "lethal zone" in H-bomb tests in the Pacific after the Bravo test proved so powerful was equal to 20% of the continental United States.

That's why, by the way, a North Korean hydrogen bomb that can be delivered by a guided missile is such a big deal.  It's a geometric increase in destruction.

As the first satellite, Sputnik also introduced globe-circling systems that have become central to global life in 2017 for communications of all kinds, GPS, power grids and more.  All that became practical just five years after Sputnik when the first communications satellite Telestar was launched by the US, and we were all rocking out to its theme song.



Now the degree of our dependence on these satellites is so great that failures to these systems have apocalyptic possibilities to rival thermonuclear war.

But for all the foreboding, the reality of Sputnik overhead was eventually also exciting (though not entirely until the televised satellite launches by the US in 1958.)  Sputnik was the first real event that proved all those science fiction dreams of rockets into space weren't just fiction.  For kids my age who'd flown on the Galaxy, the Polaris, Terra 5, the Orbit Jet and the United Planets Cruiser C-57D as well as the first manned spaceship launched on Disneyland's "Man in Space" in 1955, it was an exciting glimpse of the future we hoped for and expected, a tantalizing Coming Attractions.

 And it all started sixty years ago tonight.