The Night I Looked for Sputnik

It was a memory that stamped itself into my eight year old brain with a magical, almost mystical quality. Certainly I couldn’t have totally comprehended the significance of the moment at that tender age, yet I knew instinctively that this night was wrapped with portentous meaning. It was Saturday, October 5th, 1957. Twenty-four hours before, the Soviet Union had shattered the psyche of the entire world with the successful launch into space of mankind’s first satellite, Sputnik. The news had not reached the U.S. until this following day, partly due to Russia’s concern for secrecy in the event of a failure, and partly because back then confirmation was not an instantaneous process. But nonetheless, the news was in fact true. America had been beaten in the challenge to conquer space.

I was living in Springfield, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and our house was abuzz with this startling development. My father worked at the Philadelphia Bulletin, the area’s most widely read newspaper, and naturally he was on top of whatever was news-worthy, and this news was monumental. My brother, Joe, who is ten years my senior, was in his sophomore year of college, majoring in electrical engineering, and had dreams of working in the emerging field of rocket science.

The bold-type headline in the Bulletin read: “U.S. Scientists Tracking Satellite Launched by Soviets.” As soon as the news hit the streets everyone was looking to the skies. It didn’t matter that the satellite, as we would come to know later, was no bigger than a beachball or that it would be 139 miles above the earth at its closest point, everybody was flocking to get a glimpse of this wondrous object of human achievement. If the news was accurate, the satellite couldn’t be seen in the daytime, so as evening fell over the neighborhood, I joined Dad and Joe as we hurried up to our third floor attic with binoculars in hand. The attic was large and spacious with plenty of headroom and we walked to the front of the house where we huddled and swung open a rickety, poster-sized window. We each took turns popping our heads out into the air and scanned the sky hoping to see a bright dot moving in the heavens. The news reports said its speed was 18,000 miles per hour, a fact that was incomprehensible to our novice minds. Still we surveyed the night sky and when we couldn’t seem to locate anything that would pass for Sputnik we went to the window at the other end of the attic and repeated the process.

Joe was using his best college-boy scientific vocabulary trying to explain to us what it meant that this device would completely orbit the earth every 96 minutes, and that it was equipped with a radio transmitter that allowed for its tracking wherever it flew. Dad was more concerned with the fact that we were now vulnerable to whatever the Commies (as he called them) might want to do with their missile superiority. I sensed the strange mix of emotions combining, on the one hand, the marvelous achievement of humans conquering space, with also the ominous thoughts of being exposed to a new and possibly horrific danger.

In actuality, politics and technology were a bit beyond my scope. Nikita Khrushchev was the Soviet premier, but still two years away from slamming his shoe in the United Nations and becoming a true evil nemesis to America. NASA was yet to be formed. And JFK’s New Frontier was three years in the future. I was, after all, only eight years old and mostly consumed with Mickey Mantle, Davey Crockett, a cool new TV show called Maverick, and the wrath of Sister Thomas Edward. Still there was something astonishing and inexplicable about that starry night in October of ’57. We never did see anything that turned out to be the world’s first artificial satellite, but the shared excitement, the camaraderie, the sense of being there at a breakthrough moment, was more than enough to preserve that glorious experience in my young brain forever.