Sputnik was the Soviets' Backup Satellite

Wernher von Braun popped briefly back into his office before heading out to a pre-dinner reception. He’d spent the day giving General Bruce Medaris, head of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and Neil McElroy, incoming Secretary of Defense, a tour of the facilities where his team was building America’s first intermediate range ballistic missile. But what von Braun really wanted was to use the same IRBM to launch a small satellite into orbit, ideally before the Soviet Union did the same. He had the mission worked out and even had a rocket — RS-29 — in storage ready to deploy on what he called Project Orbiter. What he didn’t have was political blessing. That honour had gone to the US Navy’s Vanguard program, the all-American effort von Braun thought had about a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the Soviets, if it managed to launch at all. The upcoming dinner was his last chance to convince McElroy to give his team the green light to ready their rocket for a shot at space once the Navy failed. He was still in his office when the phone on the desk rang. A British voice on the line asked what he thought about it. Von Braun didn’t know what “it” was, and so the man tried again: “What do you think of the Soviet satellite that has just launched into orbit?” Von Braun might have been more shocked if he hadn’t been reading the writing on the walls. For months reports from the Soviet Union had been hinting that a satellite program was under development, that scientists were closing in on a launch date. He’d been trying to American decision makers that space was a vital part of national defense, that a huge psychological victory would go to the first nation in orbit; within 24 hours he would be proved right on that count as well. On the other side of the world, Soviet scientists in Khazakstan celebrated the news that was slowly sweeping around the world. Their satellite — SP-1 to them but Sputnik to the outside world — was in orbit. Though it was very early in the morning of October 5, the world would remember the date as it was on Moscow time. It took more than three years of planning and development, but late at night on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the space age. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOTGK5rAGQ[/embed] Though vanquished in the Second World War, the German Army produced one of the most notable technologies of the conflict. The A-4 rocket rechristened the V-2 by Goebbels’ propaganda machine was the first guided missile used as an offensive weapon, and both the United States and the Soviet Union captured the engineers behind it as a kind of intellectual reparations after the war’s end. And both countries had to establish new working groups and institutes where their new-found rocket knowledge could breed bigger and better rockets. In May of 1946, the Soviet armaments industry founded Scientific-Research Institute 88 (simply written NII-88 and pronounced like “nee-88”) in Kaliningrad. Within NII-88 another group was founded, Scientific Research Institute No.4 (NII-4) with the directive to “investigate the development of methods of testing, acceptance, storage, and combat application of missile weaponry.” At the head of NII-4 was Mikhail Tikhonravov, a former of the early Soviet rocket society called GIRD (“Group for the Study of Reactive Motion”). When numerous departments within NII-88 were consolidated into a new design bureau called OKB-1 on April 26, 1950, the head of this unit for development of long-range missiles was another GIRD man, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. But the people leading and working in these bureaus weren’t strictly armaments people. Both Tikhonravov and Korolev were familiar with the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian grandfather of rocketry who’d worked out the math on how to launch satellites into space.