Sputnik: The Shock of the Century

by Paul Dickson

Release Date: October, 2001

Edition: Hardcover

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Oprah forget Jonathan Franzen.. put your stamp on this book!

I was 11 years old when Sputnik beeped across the sky and I stood with my father in our back yard, night after night, staring at the stars. It was a time full of wonder. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, took me right back to that little girl staring at the sky, to the awe and excitement I'd felt but had forgotten. But even more than that Paul Dickson's book has given me the facts: The information I didn't understand as a child and didn't bother to learn as an adult. This isn't a book just for space 'nuts' ...although mind you, every Space-nik (!) will be thrilled... it's a book for every man woman and child who wants to know just how we came to be where we are not only in space, but on earth. Sputnik put us on a wonderful path that changed the world forever. Buy this book for your mom... then read it yourself.

Sputnik is Still Flying

On 4 October 1957, the world woke up in the space age. The first artificial satellite (people were originally calling it an artificial moon) had been successfully launched by the Soviet Union. It weighed less than 200 pounds and was only as big as a basketball, its batteries died after three weeks whereupon it went silent, and after three months aloft it disintegrated upon reentry into the atmosphere. This tiny and ephemeral ball made huge differences in science and the world political climate, and in Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Walker & Co.), Paul Dickson has reviewed them all. He has also given a history of what led up to successful launches of satellites in both the Soviet Union and the US, so that his book is a useful review not just of the first satellite but of twentieth century space exploration in general.

The Russians already had a relatively long history of thinking about space before Sputnik went up. The visionary Tsiolovsky was a self-taught scholar who in 1898 created the first formula to specify what sort of power would be needed to send an object up so as not to fall down again. He described that this could be accomplished by a "reaction machine," which we know as a rocket. He never got to use models, but his first sketch of a spaceship had fuel tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, just as the shuttle uses. He described the use of booster rockets to attain escape velocity. Of course, Dickson tells the fascinating story of our own neglected rocket man, Robert Goddard, who made real rockets and gained over 200 patents, but mostly got only posthumous credit for his accomplishments. And then there was Sergei Korolev, a Red Army Colonel, who, as "chief designer" of the Soviet rocket program, was the man responsible for Sputnik, and for Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight. Little was known about him at the time, because the Soviets wanted their space efforts to be seen as a communal, rather than an individual, effort, and they thought that if he were known, he would be a target for CIA assassination. He had also been imprisoned in the Gulag when Stalin came to believe that rockets would be used to overthrow the government. Dickson reviews the worry with which Americans viewed Sputnik, and how Eisenhower (who was criticized for not worrying enough) actually was pleased that it opened up space for spy satellites.

American science and technology were in trouble in some ways. Dickson details the rivalry between the services to claim space as a theater of operations, and the rivalry between military and civilian agencies. There were problems of underfunding of basic research. Science within education needed higher priorities, and for many schools, the Sputnik era was the first time that Darwin could be mentioned. Sputnik resulted in a meaningful American space program, and Dickson's readable and informative re-evaluation of the repercussions of the little aluminum ball shows that it affects us still.