Sputnik stunned and inspired U.S., and launched the high-tech era

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

A 23-inch Soviet spacecraft called Sputnik rocketed into orbit around the Earth 50 years ago this week, jolting a technologically complacent United States, opening the Space Age and launching a Cold War race for supremacy that has become a partnership.

Sputnik proved a major embarrassment to the United States, but it spurred the nation to revamp its science curricula in schools, to pour billions into a revitalized aerospace industry and to stimulate a major new interest in engineering careers that has led today to the fast-moving age of the Internet.

Virtually every industrial nation in the world has moved into space by now, more than 400 unmanned spacecraft are flying in orbit, and the international space station is home to repeated teams of astronauts, cosmonauts and spacefarers from many other countries. The space station is expected to be completed by 2010 and to cost $130 billion - most of it from the United States.

The moon has been visited by both Russian and American unmanned spacecraft, and, after President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation in 1961 to send humans there, Apollo astronauts made six landings to explore it from 1969 to 1972. Now President Bush has asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to send astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars - someday, Congress willing.

Meanwhile, the space shuttles keep flying, despite disasters that killed seven astronauts aboard the Challenger when it exploded after liftoff in 1986 and seven more aboard Columbia when it disintegrated during re-entry in 2003.

The satellites now in orbit play many roles: They keep tabs on the world's weather, measure Arctic sea ice as it melts from global warming and survey forest resources worldwide. They map Katrina's devastation, spot enemy strongholds in Iraq and nuclear secrets in Iran and warn of camel raiders in Darfur. Arrays of satellites form America's Global Positioning System, allowing motorists to navigate highways, mariners to sail across oceans and American tank drivers to know where they are in Iraq.

In the brief history of the Space Age, the participating nations - most often the United States - have done more than rocket Apollo astronauts to the moon and bring them home. They have collected dust from glowing comets, lofted telescopes with the power to reveal distant stars and galaxies, measured the energy of fiery supernovae and detected super-massive black holes that can warp space-time.

Even now, four long-forgotten spacecraft from America are flying silently through the darkness of the solar system's outermost limits toward distant stars.

Someday - in a few million years or more, perhaps - sentient beings somewhere on another planet might encounter a cryptic message from one of those starships, saying that here, on a lonely planet called Earth, human beings had built machines that could explore their own planetary neighborhood and then venture farther to travel throughout the galaxy.

Radios aboard those four American spacecraft are silent now, but two - the Pioneers - carry golden plaques bearing coded messages that describe earthlings and their science, while the other two -the Voyagers - carry recordings with similar evidence that humans exist and have gone to space. Both have long since accomplished their own wonders in space exploration.

A satellite called COBE and another called WMAP already are changing mankind's ideas of the cosmos itself. COBE, for the first time, has collected evidence of the faint afterglow from the Big Bang, when our universe began some 13.7 billion years ago, and WMAP has made the first map of the cosmic background radiation when the universe existed virtually at its beginning - less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

Today, the aging Hubble Space Telescope is still sending back to Earth the most spectacular images ever made of planets, stars, galaxies and nebulae, and soon a team of astronauts aboard the space shuttle will climb onto the Hubble to replace its outworn parts.

What started as an American-Soviet Cold War competition after Sputnik was launched is now more often a worldwide partnership.

In addition, China, Japan, England, France, Italy and India - even Egypt and Saudi Arabia - have sent satellites into orbit or have satellites and lunar and planetary spacecraft under construction.

The European Space Agency is a major factor in the quest for space exploration and cooperates regularly with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on joint projects. But even college students are in on the act, designing, building and launching their own microsatellites, like the tiny experimental CubeSats built and flown into orbit by undergraduates at Stanford's Space and Systems Development Laboratory and Cal Poly.

By now, unmanned spacecraft have allowed us to explore - at least from a distance - every planet in the solar system except Pluto, which the International Astronomical Union has determined is only entitled to be called a dwarf planet anyway.

Mars images have been coming back to Earth ever since the U.S.-launched Mariner 4 first flew there in 1964, and today orbiters above the planet are sending back spectacular close-up images captured by Opportunity and Spirit, the seemingly tireless six-wheeled robot rovers that are trundling across the red Martian sands and probing for evidence of long-gone water in its impact craters.

Jupiter and its family of moons have been explored by the Voyagers and one of those moons, ice-crusted Europa, has revealed tantalizing clues of an ocean - perhaps holding precursors of life - beneath the brown fracture marks of the ice.

Saturn and its rings and moons are even now being examined as the spacecraft Cassini flies past moon after Saturnian moon. And the Huygens probe, Cassini's independent passenger spacecraft, has landed by parachute on the tarry surface of the planet's largest moon, Titan, where cold cryovolcanoes spew out fountains of slushy water and ammonia while hydrocarbon lakes ripple in the wind at the poles.

In the beginning and even before Sputnik, at the onset of the highly productive International Geophysical Year in 1957, scientists from around the world agreed that a fleet of space satellites would be essential to orbit the Earth and survey everything beneath.

The United States entrusted the goal to engineers in the Navy and Army, two rivals who came up with rival plans.

And so, barely two months after the launch of Sputnik 1 and a month after Russia's Sputnik 2 had successfully carried Laika the dog into orbit, the Navy launched its own competitor: the Vanguard rocket. It rose four feet in 2 seconds, fell back to Earth and exploded.

Finally, on Jan. 31 the following year, the Army successfully launched its Jupiter-C rocket from Cape Canaveral, sending America's Explorer 1 satellite into orbit. The Russians scornfully dubbed the six-inch sphere "the grapefruit."

Jill Tarter, founder of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, where scientists search for extraterrestrial life, recalled the surge of excitement back then.

"Listening to the recorded beep ... beep ... beep of Sputnik 1, I became a direct beneficiary of the galvanic response to this apparent threat to our technological capability," she said. "Suddenly, my desire to become an engineer wasn't so unthinkable. If we were going to beat the Russians and lead the way to the 'space age,' well then, we'd need all the young talent we could train, even girls!"

On Oct. 1, 1958, Congress created NASA, but by then Soviet Sputniks and American Vanguard and Explorer satellites were already becoming commonplace in orbit.

The following year, NASA selected its first seven Mercury astronauts, but once again, the Soviets would score a first over the United States.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, aboard Vostok 1, became the first human to orbit the Earth.

It wasn't until Feb. 20, 1962, that John Glenn, aboard Friendship 7, became the first American to fly in orbit.

By then, Kennedy already had the nation's nascent space program aiming high. On May 25, 1961, he declared in a special message to Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

The Apollo program was born, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon, while Michael Collins flew their command module above them. Five more astronaut teams would land on the moon before the program ended with Apollo 17 in 1972.

Today, civilian space enterprises are moving fast, with space tourism companies luring the wealthy with offers of $20 million, round-trip flights to the space station, and commercial ventures already planning moon flights.

Google has announced its Lunar X Prize, with a total of $30 million to "the team that can soft-land a craft on the moon that roams for at least 500 meters and transmits a mooncast back to Earth by 2012." The winner gets $20 million, the another $10 million goes to also-rans.

Michael D. Griffin, NASA's current chief who was first inspired at 6 years old when his parents gave him "A Child's Book of Stars," went on to become a physicist, an aerospace engineer and a spacecraft designer. He is also something of a prophet and most recently told colleagues at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics:

"The Soviet Union's success with Sputnik was an almost unimaginable embarrassment for the United States ... a paradigm-shifting event. We felt we were falling behind in our much-vaunted technical know-how ... we questioned our military plans, our civilian research programs, and our educational systems and made changes in all those areas and more."

But Griffin looks ahead now: "We have only just begun to sail the new ocean of space," he said, "we have a very long way yet to go."