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.

Guided Missiles, Misguided Men

Norman Solomon uses the above Martin Luther King quote in his essay published in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section yesterday, in one of the more apropos and insightful pieces I've seen during this Sputnik 50th anniversary week.

He links the science and technology that got a big boost from the fears generated by Sputnik to a military-industial complex that has grown ever more powerful:

Sputnik accelerated a process that was already well under way 50 years ago. Schools were to produce America's intellectual pistons for the space race and the broader arms race. As the atomic physicist Philip Morrison had predicted in 1946, federal largesse would deftly hook the nation's colleges into active compliance. "The now amicable contracts will tighten up and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon problems," he said. "And science itself will have been bought by war on the installment plan."

We saw this trend accelerate in the late 1960s, during Vietnam: the overt addition of the university to this miltary-industrial complex. Since then it has gotten worse--and so normal nobody seems to notice. Solomon charges:

Today, no educational institution more symbolizes the magnitude of that moral corruption than the University of California. The UC system avidly continues to provide key management functions - serving as a prestigious air-freshener for the stench of annihilation technology - at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories.

On the broader disconnection of technology and moral values, Solomon points out that even though liberals are correctly championing the scientific evidence for the causes and solutions to the Climate Crisis, they should not deify science, for science does not in itself make the correct policy or moral decisions, and scientists work for harm and destruction as efficiently as for good:

For instance, the technical and ecological advantages of mass transit have long been clear; yet foremost engineering minds are deployed to the task of building better SUVs. And there has never been any question that nuclear weapons are bad for the Earth and the human future, but no one ever condemns the continuing development of nuclear weapons as a bipartisan assault on science. On the contrary, America's nonstop R&D efforts for thermonuclear weapons are all about science.

He concludes:

Fifty years after Sputnik, the American love affair with cutting-edge technology has never been more torrid. Everyday digital achievements are so fantastic that they fill our horizons and often seem to define our futures. The emphasis on speed, convenience and technical capacity keeps us fixated on the latest new frontiers. But technology cannot help with the most distinctly human and vital of endeavors - deciding what we truly care about most.

I would add one thought and a clarification. The thought is this: today's amazing technology will mean little or nothing, and the even more amazing technologies of the future that some say can transform human life, will never happen, if the world is thrown into chaos, with uncertain and unavailable energy, crippled infrastructure and more and more resources devoted to simple survival. Which all could happen if we continue to dither over the Climate Crisis.

The clarification is this: most of us would say we know very well what 'we truly care about most.' But we cannot begin to talk out a consensus on how best to preserve, protect and make those things better, or just make them happen, until we learn how to recognize and resist the lies and distortions thrown at us by the powerful who act in their own temporary self-interest, and not in the interest of anyone or anything else. For that they will destroy the future of most of humanity and of the planet itself. They are doing so now, with ever accelerating success.

Friday night at 8:30 in 1957 meant "The Life of
Riley"--"What a revoltin' development this is!"

Sputnik Calling

Update: a version of this has been front-paged at European Tribune.
Update 2: A version has been rescued at Daily Kos.

By 8 pm it was dark outside, on this early October night. 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.

I often had my radio on while I did my homework—a supposed shortwave set with a slate gray face and exposed, glowing tubes in the back, that sat on the bookshelf above and to the right of my desk, next to the globe. My father had put the radio together from a kit, and despite its impressive dials it seldom pulled in more than the local AM station. But for some reason the radio was off. I was absorbed in my homework, and I didn’t even notice the hum and murmur of the television set on the other side of the far wall, in the living room, where my parents were watching.

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. They’d just announced it on television, and broadcast the actual sounds coming from the satellite. It was called Sputnik.

At my desk I turned on my radio, which eventually played the eerie, even- toned beeping sounds from space. I was stunned.
[continued]

The news of Sputnik had spread quickly 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.

A lot of attention this 50th anniversary of Sputnik has been focused on its role in beginning the Space Age. It did that, at least for adults. The technical achievement of humans sending a rocket into space to deliver an artificial satellite into orbit around the earth marked a monumental moment. For some, this very fact was profoundly shocking. “It is hard for people now to realize how stubbornly the idea of any form of space travel was opposed before that date, “wrote science fiction writer and historian Brian Aldiss, “and not only by the supposedly ignorant.”

But kids like me had been living in the Space Age for years. I’d grown up with Captain Video, and then Space Patrol, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, one after the other on Saturday mornings.

Certainly for me as well as for imaginative adults in America, the reality of it was a cause for wonder and excitement. But it was something I was looking forward to, even expecting. I learned about rockets and space travel from Disneyland's "Tomorrowland" hour. And I knew that the U.S. was planning to rocket a satellite into orbit as part of the International Geophysical Year—sometime between the summer of 1957 and the end of 1958. But I wasn't prepared for the Russians doing it first.

I’d even heard one of the smartest men in America, the quiz show champion Charles van Doren, talk about it on a television documentary about the IGY. The newsman interviewing him asked if the Russians might orbit a satellite first. He just chuckled. Years later, of course, van Doren admitted that on “The 64 Thousand Dollar Question,” he’d been given the answers.

the Bravo H-Bomb test

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. No doubt some also saw it as an opportunity to intensify Cold War fears.

Those fears were already in the air, and had been for most of the decade. So as I sat there in the pool of light surrounded by darkness, listening to the grim monotone from above, I opened my brown notebook and wrote about what had just happened. I still have that notebook:

"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 was eleven years old. 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. (Clearly, Cold War paranoia was already in the air.) It gave us more (and more obviously useless) ‘duck and cover’ drills, and it started a national furor over our education, 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 loans for college, which is how many of us got there.

But there was also real basis for alarm. 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 leapt 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 Sputnik II launched a month later) proved the Soviets had built missiles capable of reaching the U.S. and delivering atomic bombs. Sputnik itself was beeping over America to remind them.

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.

Now we also know that the intent of Sputnik was precisely to demonstrate this threat, not to start an era of space exploration, though that was a common dream of some Soviet scientists as well as Americans. According to a recent AP report, the Sputnik launch was "a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age."

"As described by the former scientists, the world's first orbiter was born out of a very different Soviet program: the frantic development of a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb. Because there was no telling how heavy the warhead would be, its R-7 ballistic missile was built with thrust to spare — "much more powerful than anything the Americans had," Georgy Grechko, a rocket engineer and cosmonaut, told AP. The towering R-7's high thrust and payload capacity, unmatched at the time, just happened to make it the perfect vehicle to launch an object into orbit — something never done before. Without the looming nuclear threat, Russian scientists say, Sputnik would probably have gotten off the ground much later."

"The key reason behind the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Chertok said. "The military missile was the main thing we were thinking of at the moment."

Sputnik was an important moment, but it didn’t begin the Cold War or Cold War paranoia (like the early 1950s Blacklist) or the subterranean fear of nuclear war (we’d been watching those radiation monster movies most of the decade.) It did threaten to make space another battlefield.

This could well be the real significance of this anniversary for us now. Beginning with his dream of space-based weapons that to the eternal chagrin of George Lucas came to be called Star Wars, Ronald Reagan began what George W. Bush wants to intensify and expand. The Russians have picked this moment to warn that if any country puts weapons in space it will lead to a new arms race. Only the US has shown any inclination to do so. And several peace organizations have chosen this week for an international week of protest to stop the militarization of space.

Apart from the threat of nuclear warfare from space, there is a very real ongoing threat to what’s up there in space now—the most tangible legacy of the Space Age, such as communications and global positioning satellites, and the space-based technology behind the ground level gadgets we increasingly depend on and take for granted—including the Internet, cell phones and GPS.

Apart from the questionable drift to total dependence on these technologies, so vulnerable to accident and attack, there is the simple fact of space garbage. At the speed it moves, a tiny piece of debris can kill a satellite. And there is an awful lot of it up there. According to David Wright in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "Some 4,500 launches have taken place since Sputnik, and there are currently 850 active satellites in space, owned by some 50 countries, as well as nearly 700,000 pieces of debris large enough to damage or destroy those satellites."

Put the danger of debris together with the whole idea of space warfare, which could create so much debris in orbit around the earth that no spacecraft would survive, and the Space Age would be over. Sorry, no Star Trek. And maybe no cell phones either.

These are some of the reasons that scientists and writers like Wright and Laura Grego (behind a pay wall) at New Scientist are pointing out the even greater significance of a 40th anniversary this month—the October 10, 1967 signing of the Outer Space Treaty, since ratified by some 100 countries. It states:

“The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”

Of course it’s just one of many international treaties that the Bush administration ignores and wants to destroy. But as Laura Grego writes in the September 8, 2007 New Scientist:

“While we look back at the achievements of half a century in space, we should look ahead, too, and make it a priority to safeguard our common heritage in space and our security on Earth.”