Because of Sputnik

‘Sputnik’ means ‘travelling companion’ in Russian, and in fact that's what the little capsule was--a travelling companion to the ICBM it rode atop, a side-project to what was really a weapons test. Nikita Khruschev’s son writes that at first, neither his father, nor the Soviet government saw the launch, which took place fifty years ago yesterday, as a milestone. Indeed, it didn’t even make the front page of Pravda. Only after international press made a sensation of Sputnik, did the Russians claim it as such, four days later.

I initially wanted to write an ode to Sputnik. The fact is that if Sputnik had never been launched, I wouldn’t be in Russia. But then I thought that an ode was a little premature--I've only been here six weeks.

Sputnik is what first got me interested in Russia and the Soviet Union. It started with the film October Sky, which starred a very young Jake Gyllenhaal as Homer Hickham, Jr., the son of West Virginia coal miner, who dreams of becoming a rocket scientist when he sees Sputnik whizzing across the sky (what he really saw was the spent rocket, but oh well). That summer I went to Space Camp which, in addition to being perhaps the lowest apple on the satire tree (saying you've gone is like telling people your sexual-sounding middle name), is also a really great place to relive the Cold War. You spend ten days fixated on the glory days of NASA (1961-1971); you learn exclusively about the American manned space program; you're constantly reminded of the great 'space race' but not why it was important, against whom it was run (more than just the USSR), or why we won. They do, however, go out of their way to point out that the Soviets screwed up a lot more than we did, lost many cosmonauts, and always covered it up. We saw photos of Proton rockets and Soyuz spacecrafts and, of course, Sputnik but only as if they were UFOs. To me it all looked so cool, so much less practical than our stuff, and with all those strange cyrillic letters and Russian names--Gagarin, Tereshkova, Korolev. The Russians even had a space station at that point, the ill-fated "Mir," which, by 1998 was seriously ailing, though some reason, that made me love it more.