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Let's see I was 9 yrs old when I began the nightly "watch the sky" nights. It was so low in orbit we could see it from earth.

The Real Sputnik Story
Forget the hype. The '57 launch wasn't such a big shock.

By Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 4:45 PM ET Oct 1, 2007

On the Saturday morning in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched the world's first manmade satellite and inaugurated the space age, President Dwight Eisenhower played golf, a NEWSWEEK reporter in Boston described "massive [public] indifference" and some American papers ran the story as a small box on page three. And why not? The Soviets had announced plans to go into space no fewer than 20 times since 1951: as part of their participation in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a global program to study Earth's physics starting in July 1957, they even told an American official the orbital speed and launch site of the little satellite they planned.

It usually takes time for myths to take hold. But in the case of Sputnik—launched on Oct. 4, 1957—myth supplanted reality within days and continues to warp the lessons of that "red moon." Less than a week after Sputnik began orbiting Earth once every 96 minutes, politicians and the press had spun it into a shocking symbol of Soviet superiority that could soon lead to nukes falling on American cities. But far from being alarmed by Sputnik, newly released archives show, Eisenhower and his military and intelligence advisers welcomed it. The terror triggered by the uninstrumented, 184-pound silvery satellite, roughly the size and shape of a blue-ribbon watermelon and emitting an A-flat beep from its rudimentary radio transmitter, had little basis in reality. With Sputnik's 50th anniversary this week, we're in danger of getting it wrong yet again, for the supposed lessons of Sputnik are ones we should actually unlearn. Most important, it is wrong to believe "that the American people need 'another Sputnik' " to increase our competitive juices in space or technology, says historian Walter McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania, author of the 1997 book "The Heavens and the Earth." The United States "does not need another ill-conceived spasmodic reaction to some humiliation that does not pose an immediate threat."

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