Red Moon Over the U.S.

Hurtling unseen, hundreds of miles from the earth, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball passed over the world's continents and oceans one day last week. As it circled the globe for the first time, traveling at 18.000 m.p.h., the U.S. was blissfully unaware that a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind's conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war.

The news came in a broadcast by Moscow radio, and it got to Washington in an ironic way. 'At the Soviet embassy on 16th Street that evening, some 50 scientists of 13 nations, members of the International Geophysical Year rocket and satellite conference, were gathered at a cocktail party. After the vodka. Scotch and bourbon started to flow, New York Times Reporter Walter Sullivan got an urgent phone call from his paper, hurried back to whisper in the ear of a U.S. scientist. A moment later Physicist Lloyd Berkner rapped on the hors d'oeuvre table until the hubbub quieted. "I wish to make an announcement," he said. "I am informed by the New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers [559 miles]. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement."

Sputnik's Pulse. By then, the world's communication systems were already crackling with the story that the Russians had launched history's first man-made earth satellite, and scientists across the U.S. were being routed out by newspapers and colleagues. The Russians called it sputnik; it weighed 184.3 Ibs., they said, and was sending continuous radio signals (see SCIENCE).

At Washington's Naval Research Laboratory, control center of the U.S.'s satellite Project Vanguard, men worked through the night in the white glare of searchlights to adjust rooftop radio aerials to pick up the pulse beat. Coolheaded scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, got on the long distance phone to alert amateur astronomers across the U.S., pulled the switch on Operation Moonwatch, the skygazing network the U.S. had set up to track its own unborn earth satellite. Other Smithsonian scientists sorted and fed into an electronic brain the fragmentary reports from moonwatchers, observatories and radio hams.

Commercial radio stations, too, picked up sputnik's signals. "Listen now," said an NBC announcer, in a voice his listeners would not soon forget, "for the sound which forever more separates the old from the new." And over thousands of earthbound radios sounded the eerie beep . . . beep . . . beep from somewhere out in space.

Dreams into Reality. In the nation's reaction to those chilling beeps the impulse to applaud a mighty scientific achievement soon froze in the rigors of the cold war. The Red satellite was a milestone in history, a giant step toward the conquest of interplanetary space. But it was also a Communist achievement with serious implications for the West that the Communists themselves made clear. Cold-war propaganda rang in the Russian announcement: "The present generation will witness how the freed and conscious labor of the people of the new socialist society turns even the most daring of man's dreams into a reality."

Despite the official White House line that "the Soviet launching did not come as any surprise," highly surprised scientists and military men drew some quick lessons from sputnik's success. Items: P: To put the 184.3-lb. satellite in its orbit, the Russians had to have an operational ballistic missile driven by a rocket engine at least as big as the U.S.'s biggest and best; hence the Russians probably have a workable intercontinental ballistics missile.

P: U.S. intelligence had no warning of the firing of the sputnik. P: U.S. policymakers probably have been seriously underestimating Russian scientific capability; in vital sectors of the technology race the U.S. may well have lost its precious lead.

Transatlantic Tribute. "The time has clearly come," said New Hampshire Republican Styles Bridges, the Mr. Conservative of the U.S. Senate, "to be less concerned with the depth of pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin on the new car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat and tears." It was true, as some scientists said, that the U.S., with an all-out effort, probably could have fired its own satellite by now. (Last week Project Vanguard put its 72-ft. TV2 launching rocket--see cut--through the third in a series of seven tests.) Contrariwise it was true that the U.S. had lost its lead because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too much on military research and development. Russia's victory in the satellite race proved that the U.S. had not tried hard enough.

In a transatlantic tribute the London Express predicted the future better than most surprised Americans: "The result will be a new [U.S.] drive to catch up and pass the Russians in the sphere of space exploration. Never doubt for a moment that America will be successful."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.