Sputnik

The name that means fellow traveller

In Russian, sputnik (спутник) comes from с- (together) and путь (path), so it literally means a fellow traveller or companion; in astronomy it was already the ordinary word for a satellite of a planet. In 1957 it became the name of an Earth satellite, and it entered other languages as a loanword.

The launch, and what the world suddenly knew

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union placed Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, into orbit. The beeping signal of its 83.6 kg metal sphere was audible on amateur receivers anywhere on the planet, and the flight opened both the space age and the U.S.-Soviet space race. The same demonstration suggested that the USSR could put a nuclear payload on a ballistic missile aimed at the United States.

What the satellite actually was

Its lead designers were Sergei Korolev and Kerim Kerimov, and the spacecraft was a 58 cm metal sphere weighing 83.6 kg with an orbital period of 96 minutes. Sputnik 1 took no photographs and made no sophisticated measurements; all it did was emit a high-pitched beep. Its symbolic meaning and historical consequences were nonetheless immense.

The Sputnik crisis and its consequences

The United States had its own satellite plans, but Sputnik 1 reached orbit first. The shock changed policy: on 31 January 1958 the US launched Explorer 1, and in July 1958 Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA. The USSR followed up on 3 November 1957 with Sputnik 2, carrying the dog Laika, and on 15 May 1958 Sputnik 3 carried a large array of instruments but a failed tape recorder prevented it from mapping the Van Allen belts.

How the shock spread, and space law

Sputnik spurred expanded science education and space programmes in the United States and influenced the emergence of United Nations space law. In Western Europe critics charged that after Sputnik the two superpowers agreed to observe the Earth from satellites, protecting Soviet secrecy and their own spy-satellite programmes, and that declared open-skies proposals, including mutual aerial survey flights, were not honoured. The launch also accelerated the concentration of scientific, technological, and space research in Czechoslovakia and the USSR.

The first gateway of the space programme

Sputnik 1 opened the Soviet space programme, which from 1957 to 1965 came first through the earliest gates of the space age: the first artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight, the first woman in space, the first spacewalk. Korolev, who led the launch, had been arrested on false charges in 1938 and passed through the Kolyma gold mines and a prison design bureau before rehabilitation in 1957; his name remained classified in his lifetime. The R-7 family of launchers and the Soyuz line descended from it still carry crews into orbit.

What the name came to cover

The launch of Sputnik 1 extended the name to a whole family of satellites, and more than forty further Sputniks reached orbit; the two launched after the Cold War, Sputnik 40 and 41, commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the first flight. Sputnik 40, launched in 1997, decayed from orbit on 21 May 1998, and the unlaunched backup satellite destroyed with Mir on 23 March 2001 is not to be confused with it.