The secrets of the 1957 Sputnik launch are revealed

Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, could not say a word about the launch of the satellite. Now, at the age of 95, he speaks for the first time and tells how the Soviets achieved supremacy over the West in conquering space

When Sputnik took off, 50 years ago, the whole world looked up in awe and fear, and watched what seemed like the unveiling of an organized plan to conquer space and a point of victory in the Cold War.
However, 50 years later, it seems that the important launch was far from being part of a planned strategy to prove Soviet superiority over the West. Instead, the first satellite was the result of a bet led by the dream of a scientist who "snorted" a missile, matched him with the satellite and forced the skeptical Kremlin to usher in the space age.

The flickering code of light that crowds all over the world gathered to see in the night sky? She was not Sputnik at all. It was the second stage of the Halvin's accelerator, claims Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program. In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, Chertok and other space industry alumni told how Sputnik was launched and how he was able to achieve the unexpected feat.
Chertok could not tell a single word about the project for most of his life. His name, as well as the name of Sergei Korolev, the chief scientist, were a state secret. Today, at the age of 95 and speaking to a small group of journalists in Moscow, Chertok finally spoke about his pride in his decisive part in the history of space exploration. "Each of the first launchers was like a beloved wife to us," he said. "We were in love with every rocket, and we desperately wanted to launch it successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see them fly. This passion and Korolev's determination were key to Sputnik's success.
But so was the coincidence. As the retired scientist described, the first Earthquake was born from a completely different Soviet plan, the ambitious plan to produce missiles that could hit the US and drop hydrogen bombs on it. Because no one told them how heavy the missiles were supposed to be, they built the R-7 missiles with spares in them, and they were actually more powerful than anything America had, says Gregory Gretzko, a rocket engineer and cosmonaut. The huge launcher and its ability to carry a useful payload was unlike what was required at all at the time, and it just so happened that it was an ideal vehicle for launching an object into orbit around the Earth - something that had not been done before.
In fact, without the nuclear threat, the Russian scientists say, Sputnik would almost certainly have taken off much later.

Competition with the Americans
"The main reason for the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Chertok said. "The military missiles were the main thing we were thinking about at that moment." When the warhead project ran into obstacles, Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program decided to seize the opportunity. A visionary scientist and extremely powerful man, Korolev pressured the Kremlin to allow him to launch a satellite. The US had already planned a similar move for 1958, he said, as part of the International Geophysical Year.
However, while the government approved the project in January 1956, the military wanted to keep the missiles for the bombing program. Grechko, 76, said, "They treated the satellites as toys, a stupid fantasy of Korlev's."

"The Americans had a plan to launch satellites," said Grechko. "The American program was called Vanguard, but they found themselves lagging behind us."
The Soviet Union also had a satellite in development, but it was taking too long to complete, Korolev knew, so he ordered his team to quickly develop a primitive compass. It was called PS-1, an acronym for the words 'Prosterhi Sputnik' - the first satellite.
Gretzko, who calculated the speed for the first satellite launch, said he and other young engineers tried to convince Korolev to equip Sputnik with some scientific instruments. Korolev refused, saying there was no time. "If Korolev would have listened to us and started adding instruments to the satellite, the Americans would have been able to open the space age," Grechko said.
The satellite, which weighed 83 kilograms, was built in less than 3 months. The Soviet planners built a sphere consisting of an aluminum shell and containing two radio transmitters and four antennas. The original design of the satellite was conical in shape, but Korolev preferred the spherical shape. "The Earth is round, and the first satellite to be launched must have a spherical shape", Chertok quotes him today. Sputnik's surface is morocco to better reflect the sun's rays and prevent overheating.
The launch was initially planned for October 6, but Korolev feared that the US was planning a launch a day earlier. The KGB was asked to check, but the news apparently had no basis. However, Korolev did not want to take a risk. He canceled some last-minute checks and brought the launch up two days, to October 4, 1957.

One more moon
"More than any other person, Korolev understood how important it was to usher in the space age," Geretzko said. "Earth has only had one moon for billions of years and suddenly it has another one, an artificial moon." Shortly after launch from the arid plains of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, the satellite emitted the world's most famous beep. However, the engineers on the ground did not immediately grasp its importance.
"At that moment, we couldn't understand the importance of the action we did," recalls Chertok. "We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the whole world was running amok. Only four or five days later, we realized that what we did caused a turning point in the history of human culture."
Immediately after the launch, Korolev called Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to inform him of the success. Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who was by his father's side at the moment of this conversation, remembers that they listened to the beeps and immediately after that he went to sleep. Sergey Korolev said that initially they saw the launch as another in a series of technological achievements of the Soviet Union, like the first jet airliner or the first atomic power plant.
"All of us, Korolev's people, who worked on the program, Khrushchev and myself saw this as another achievement that proves that Soviet science and economics are on the right track," said the younger Khrushchev, now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
The first Soviet report on the Sputnik launch was brief and buried deep within the pages of the Pravda, the Communist Party's daily newspaper. But two days later he was in the headlines citing a rolling snowball of international reactions. Pravda also published a description of Sputnik's orbit to allow people to see it as it passed overhead. The article failed to mention that the light the observers saw crossing the night sky was the light of the booster's second stage, which remained roughly in the same orbit as the small satellite that was invisible to the naked eye.
Excited by international fame, Khrushchev ordered Korolev to immediately launch a new satellite, this time to mark the celebrated Bolshevik Revolution Day on November 7. "We didn't believe you would get the Americans with your satellite, but you did, and now you have to launch a new satellite by November 7." Grechko quoted Korolev's memoirs.
Working around the clock, Korolev and his team built another satellite in less than a month. On November 3, they launched Sputnik 2, which already weighed about 500 kg and carried the first live cargo, a mixed-breed dog named Laika in a small air-compressed chamber. The dog died of a heart attack after about a week (and according to many experts this happened after a few hours), which drew a protest from animal lovers, but the flight confirmed that a living creature can survive in space, and this paved the way for manned flights.
The first Sputnik beeped for 3 weeks and spent three months in space before burning up in the atmosphere. He circled the Earth about 1,400 times, a little less than a hundred minutes for each lap. For Korolev there was also bitterness and not just joy, because he was never mentioned as one of the contributors to the launch, and his key role was known only to a few officials and space planners.

An achievement of the entire Soviet people
Leonid Sedov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who was not associated with the space program, was ironically presented to the West as the father of Sputnik. Meanwhile, Karolyev was allowed to publish only his insensitive research, under a pseudonym - Prof. K. Sergeev. Khrushchev rejected the Nobel committee's proposal to give the prize to Korolev, insisting that it was an achievement of the entire Soviet people.
Sergei Khrushchev said his father thought reporting on Korolev would upset other missile designers and harm the Soviet missile and space programs. "These people behaved like actors, they were all jealous of Korolev", he said. "I believe that my father's decision was psychologically correct, but of course Korolev felt hurt."
Korolev's daughter, Natalya, wrote in the book that the concealment drew her father. "We were like miners - we worked underground," she quotes him as saying. "No one has heard of us."
The Soviet Union and the rest of the world learned about Korolev's name only after his death in 1966. His home in Moscow, where Chertok met with the journalists, became a museum in honor of the chief scientist.
Chertok was allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union only in the late XNUMXs, after the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, liberalized the Soviet Union. First the surviving space program are no longer anonymous nor are they silent, and they demand the glory that was taken from them. "The rivalry in space, although it had military reasons, pushed the human race forward," says Valerie Curzon, a cosmonaut who served as deputy director of the Star City Cosmonaut Training Center. Our achievements today originate from that competition," he said.
In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, almost 12 years later. Khrushchev was not interested in getting there, his son says, and efforts were made during the time of his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, but they were unsuccessful, leading to quarrels between Korolev and the other planners. "We wouldn't have reached the moon first anyway," Korolev said. "We lost the race because our electronic industry was backward."
Today, although Sputnik has entered the history books, it is still used as a driving force. In August, when the Russian crew was hoisted onto the seabed at the North Pole, the Kremlin likened it to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon - a sign, perhaps, of how much the Russians still cling to the first achievement in space.