In 1957, Sputnik -- "traveler" in Russian -- was the world's first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth. Sputnik looked like a strange silver toy. It was an aluminum sphere twenty-three inches in diameter that weighed 184 pounds. Four radio antennae and two beeping transmitters aboard allowed its Soviet ground crew to track its location. The satellite was the work of Sergei Korolev, the USSR's top rocketeer. Korolev's Semyorka or R-7 rocket, which was originally developed as part of the design for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, put the little satellite in an orbit circling the Earth every ninety-three minutes. Sputnik circled for twenty one days before it burned up in the atmosphere.
As Korolev freely admitted, Sputnik was a relatively unsophisticated piece of machinery. (The US would launch a much more sophisticated payload a few months later.) But Sputnik's simplicity was not due to a lack of technology on the part of the Soviets. The Soviets had in fact been working on the launch of an incredibly complex satellite loaded with advanced research equipment, but they had abandoned that plan in favor of the simple sphere. The reason for the change in plan was equally simple: the Soviets wanted to beat the Americans to the launch, and they wanted to make the feat look easy.
For the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his government, Sputnik was a propaganda tool. Khrushchev even provided the world with the satellite's transmitter frequency so that amateur astronomers could listen in. For Korolev and other scientists and engineers, the little "traveler" was the first real taste of the manned space travel that was still to come.
