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Sputnik,
Part II
Brian
Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com
Five years ago, I had our science editor,
Allen F. Bortrum, or "Dr. Bortrum" as he's known around
here, comment on what was then the 45th anniversary
of Sputnik. I also gave him the book by Paul Dickson
I wrote of last time, "Sputnik: The Shock of the Century."
Following are Dr. Bortrum's thoughts from those days.
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[Initially,
referring to the book's title?]
At
first I thought, "Come on, what about the atom bomb,
DNA or a host of other things?" Surely, that small
beeping ball doesn't rate top billing for shock value.
However, reading the book brought back my own memories
of that day in 1957 when Sputnik burst upon the scene
and of the combination of awe, fear, admiration and
consternation it inspired. I agree with a quote in
the book of the physicist Lloyd Berkner. He predicted
that when 2100 AD rolls around, the year 1957 will
stand out as the year man progressed from a two-dimensional
to a three- dimensional geography.
On
October 4, 1957 I was one month shy of marking my
fifth anniversary at Bell Labs. Five years earlier,
in November of 1952, we stayed an extra day in Cleveland
before driving to New Jersey to start my new job.
The extra day allowed me to cast the first vote of
my life, the first of two votes I would cast for Dwight
Eisenhower. Ike was president on that fateful day
when, for the first time in history, man had thrown
something into the air that didn't come down. Well,
it did come down, but 162 days later. For 21 of those
days, the 184 pound Sputnik containing only a radio
transmitter and batteries to power it, sent out a
"beep-beep-beep" in the key of A-flat for all to hear
as it passed overhead. Although technologically unsophisticated
by today's standards, Sputnik had an impact that,
like 9/11, told us the world would never be the same.
I
recall that in those days it was common to joke that
the Russians were claiming to have invented all kinds
of things that we knew, or thought we knew, someone
else had invented. I remember standing out on the
lawn with our neighbors in our garden apartment complex
looking skyward to get a glimpse of Sputnik as it
orbited overhead. After the initial shock of seeing
and hearing Sputnik, the realization set in that this
time these Soviets had indeed invented something.
Furthermore, that something was put in orbit by a
rocket system that could just as well place a nuclear-tipped
missile on New York or anywhere the Soviets desired.
The fear was palpable. I knew one Bell Labs fellow
who invested in a bomb shelter. Indeed, some even
worried that there could be a bomb in Sputnik itself
that would be dropped upon us.
All
this came at a time when the U.S. had working for
us the cream of the crop of the German rocket scientists
and engineers who built the V-2 weapons that the Nazis
rained down on London in World War II. Werner von
Braun and his colleagues were working for the U.S.
Army and had been lobbying vigorously with the government
to get permission to launch a satellite. However,
to their disgust, Eisenhower denied their request.
In fact, it was rumored that von Braun and his crew
were monitored closely to ensure that they did not
disobey orders and sneak a satellite into orbit. In
fact, a Jupiter C rocket was launched in 1956 with
one of its engines loaded with sand instead of fuel
so as to prevent an "accidental" insertion of the
rocket's fourth stage into orbit!
When
the Soviets beat us to the punch with Sputnik, you
might think that Eisenhower was quite upset. Quite
the contrary, according to Dickson. Ike was actually
secretly happy to see that Soviet satellite circling
over the U.S. Why? He knew something he couldn't tell
us. Namely, we had the U-2 planes flying high over
the USSR and knew what the Soviets were up to. But
Ike knew that couldn't go on forever. What he wanted
was an "open skies" policy so that the U.S. could
feel free to eventually launch spy satellites to monitor
the military capabilities of the Soviet Union. When
Sputnik flew over us, Voila! We had our de facto open
sky and space was thrown open to all. In retrospect,
it makes me feel better about my votes for Ike, who
gets higher and higher ratings from historians as
time goes by.
Well,
the Soviets followed with other firsts - the first
animal in space, the first man in space and in orbit,
the first woman in space, the first landing of a probe
on the moon, the first views of the other side of
the moon, the first space station, etc. In 1973, I
saw Yuri Gagarin's capsule in an exhibit in Moscow.
Needless to say, the craft that housed the first man
in space and in orbit was a very popular attraction.
I also won't forget the day that the Soviets landed
the first probe on the moon. The next day at Bell
Labs we had two Soviet visitors whom I had met at
crystal growth meetings. I greeted them that morning
saying in Russian what I hope meant "I congratulate
you on landing on the moon."
Of
course, the U.S., spurred on by Sputnik, was aroused
out of its complacency and you know the rest. After
many embarrassing setbacks and the tragedy of the
launch pad fire that killed three astronauts, the
U.S. got cracking. There followed the marvels of the
Apollo and subsequent moon landings, driving around
on the moon in an environmentally correct electric
vehicle and the breathtaking pictures brought back
from the Hubble telescope and the spacecraft that
have flown to the far reaches of our solar system.
And how could we live without our weather and communications
satellites? Or the term "rocket scientist", as in
he's no rocket scientist.
It
never occurred to me as I watched Sputnik sail by
overhead that one day I would actually meet someone
from the Soviet Union who had designed and built a
key component of that very satellite. Some four decades
elapsed before I met Vladimir and his wife Irina,
who came to spend a brief period with our battery
group at UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Vladimir is a very refined, delightful gentleman who
is proficient in several languages. Irina, on the
other hand, spoke no English and I labored mightily
to converse with her with my feeble Russian, mostly
unsuccessfully I'm afraid.
Unfortunately,
it was after they had left us that I learned that
Vladimir and Irina were responsible for powering the
transmitter broadcasting those beeps heard round the
world. Vladimir designed and Irina built the silver-zinc
batteries that flew on Sputnik. Silver-zinc batteries
are not your run of the mill battery and have their
own special niches. Aside from being the first battery
system in space, the 300-ton silver-zinc battery used
in Soviet submarines not only served as a power source
but also must have diminished the amount of ballast
needed to dive the sub into the ocean depths. The
silver-zinc battery continues to be used in submarines,
torpedoes and submersibles. At the other extreme,
silver-zinc batteries have seen service on such far
out places as the Space Station, the Lunar Rover on
the moon and the Mars Lander.
While
the U.S. had Werner von Braun and his colleagues,
it was Sergei Korolev who was the preeminent figure
in the Soviet space program. It was Korolev who was
responsible for the Sputniks, Lunas, Gagarin's flight,
and other spacecraft such as the familiar Soyuz that
carried astronauts into space. Korolev's importance
to the Soviet space program was so great that his
identity as "chief designer" was kept secret until
only a year before his death, partly out of fear that
he might be assassinated by our CIA.
Korolev's
life is a book unto itself. He helped found a Moscow
rocketry group that worked on liquid fuel rockets
and in 1934 the USSR Ministry of Defense published
his book "Rocket Flight into the Stratosphere". Another
leading figure in the rocket effort was a poor soul
named Ivan Kleimenov. Unfortunately, for Kleimenov,
Joseph Stalin decided that Kleimenov's institute was
going to use their rocketry to overthrow him. Furthermore,
Kleimenov had worked for Aeroflot in Berlin. In Stalin's
eyes, that made him a spy. So Stalin had him and his
deputy executed. Stalin's stupidity extended to Korolev,
who was jailed on trumped up charges and sent to Siberia,
ending up in one of the infamous gulags so eloquently
described by Solzhenitsyn.
With
the advent of World War II, Stalin changed his mind
and in his warped fashion allowed the formation of
a design group of the best engineers to work on military
technology - in prison! After four years in the gulags,
Korolev was transferred into such a group, which came
up with a liquid fuel rocket engine that was installed
on some Soviet bombers. Finally, after he had been
jailed for 6 years, Stalin allowed as to how Korolev
and 34 other engineers had been "rehabilitated" and
they were free. A long time associate, Mikhail Tikhonravov,
convinced Korolev that it would only take sheer rocket
power, developed by using multiple stages, to accomplish
something that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had shown mathematically
in 1903. Tsiolkovsky had of course shown that an object
thrown at a certain velocity would orbit the earth.
Korolev ultimately ended up building the Soviets'
first ICBM rocket, the one that would launch Sputnik,
and the rest is history.
In
1962, Korolev's design group began work on a rocket
to deliver cosmonauts to the moon. However, in January
of 1966 he died from, of all things, a messed up hemorrhoid
operation! A couple years later, Yuri Gagarin, after
surviving the hazardous flight in space, died in a
plane crash at the age of 34. A final note of irony
- on our drive to New Jersey in 1952, I learned that
my wife had canceled my vote for Ike with her vote
for Adlai Stevenson.
Note:
NASA's Web site provided some of the information used
in this column. I highly recommend Dickson's book
for a fascinating account of those years surrounding
Sputnik. Some of the tales of intrigue and chicanery
are unbelievable.
Allen
F. Bortrum
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Wall
Street History will return next week.
Brian
Trumbore
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