Just before midnight on Friday October 4th, 1957, fifty two years ago today, something kinda weird happened. Remember your mother telling you whatever goes up must come down? Well something went up through the clouds that night and never came down. Well.....yes it did, sort of - but it was never designed to land, so after it circled the planet for ninety two days, it entered the earth`s atmosphere on January 4th and was quickly toast.
In its short life as a tiny moving speck of light among the stars circling our world every 96 minutes, it both fascinated and shocked North Americans. Its alien beeping sound picked up and broadcast on radio stations told Americans. Ha, ha, we got here first. You guys are second. Both embarrassing and scary.
Launched from the lonely steppes in remote Kazakhstan, what has emerged since tells another story. Sputnik`s spectacular launch was much less than what had been planned. A propaganda scheme to flaunt Communist Russia`s superiority over America. Sputnik was to be a Rolls Royce in space, weighing over 1000 pounds and loaded with state of the art scientific equipment from Russia`s finest scientists and engineers--but it was not to be.
This gigantic piece of hardware was quickly mothballed. A couple of American tries had failed and Khrushchev`s people believed the U.S. might get lucky and pull it off any day. Being second banana in space with the world`s biggest and jazziest satellite is not as sexy as being there first.
Being first in the world through the frontiers of space. That`s forever......and gets you in the history books big time. A quick change in plan. Russian space genius, Sergei Korolyov and his team quickly began to build a second Sputnik - a spur of the moment gamble. With a scrounged kerosene powered rocket the size of a boxcar, they launched, not a half ton monster as planned, but a beachball sized globe weighing only 184 pounds, trailing four metal antennas, with onboard chemical batteries that would power the satellite's transmitters for only three weeks.
However, it wasn`t exactly chopped liver. It orbited the earth 1400 times at 18.000 miles an hour, about 560 miles above us and hung in there for three months, playing out Sir Isaac Newton's 1687 gravitation hypothesis, and proving him correct.
Although some knew a bit about the Soviet space program, for the average Joe and Jane around the globe the thought that the Russians could launch something in space that could fly anywhere in the world conjured up scary images of atom bombs and nuclear war.
Tensions were not eased much when not long after Sputnik`s launch Khrushchev said "In the case of war, it would be fought on the American continent, which can be reached by our rockets.....and Europe might become a veritable cemetery."
So much for what the bad guys were doing back then.
There was another more cheery side to the gloom and doom and it began a few months after Germany was defeated in 1945.
Bernie Lovell, a 32-year-old former wartime radar engineer, now a physicist and astronomer borrowed some surplus army equipment including a mobile radar unit and set up shop at Manchester University.
After finding the electric trams in the city produced interference he trucked all the gear to a muddy field to begin radio-astronomy research. The spot was called Jodrell Bank. His dream was to build a large steerable telescope.
By mid 1957 with gobs of government money he constructed the world`s largest. So large, the massive 76 meter dish could be seen for miles around. The landmark, fully steerable radio telescope came at a price. The many millions in cost overruns were so great that by late September Britain`s Auditor General was on the verge of asking Parliament to jail the eminent Scientist for theft.
Then, only days later, on October 4, 1957 Sputnik was launched by the Russians. England and America were now within range of nuclear attack. The only tracking device in the world that could track an object in space was Bernard Lovell`s massive radar telescope at Jodrell Bank.
He received a worried call from defense officials in London and confirmed that he could simply track an incoming soviet missile but that was all he could do. On the contrary the defense official said, you can give us seven minutes warning before a missile lands in London, giving us enough time to launch a counter nuclear attack with our bombers and those on the U.S. Strategic Air Command. We could have hundreds of bombers in the air able to wipe out Moscow and many other large cities in the U.S.S.R., killing millions of Russians..
The Russians quickly got the message - launch a nuclear missile and we wipe Russia off the map..
Thus was born project Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD.
After ten years of cold war peace the strategy of mutually assured destruction was described by United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in a speech on September 18, 1967.
MAD is a "Poison Pill" strategy. The doctrine assumes that each side has enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other side and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate escalation resulting in both combatants' total and assured destruction.
Sounds pretty scary - but heck, we are still here
The Jodrell Bank radio telescope became the Western World protection through the cold war.
In 1962 President Kennedy asked that the Jodrell Bank telescope be directed to monitor the skies over Cuba.
The good news is......Bernard Lovell didn`t go to jail for the millions of pounds in cost overruns. He was knighted by the Queen in 1961.
Sir Bernard Lovell turned 95 earlier this year and he is still working.
