Controversy about the Meaning of Sputnik
There is an interesting controversy about the background of the Soviet success in beating the United States into orbit with its Sputnik series of satellites. A 2004 article by T. A. Heppenheimer1 makes the challenging argument that the U.S. government deliberately allowed the Soviets to launch the first orbital satellite. Heppenheimer’s argument in brief is as follows:
For nearly a decade, the U.S. military had been secretly exploring the feasibility of a then-fanciful idea, being developed by RAND and other think-tanks, of a satellite surveillance system that would be able to prevent a surprise nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. In March 1954, RAND had produced a classified two-volume report of the studies on this system that it had undertaken under this “Project Feedback.” However, RAND analysts pointed out that in the absence of any man-made satellites there was no legal precedent or principle by which it could be established that such surveillance of Soviet territory from orbit would not be seen as an infringement upon sovereign Soviet airspace—as high-flying surveillance aircraft such as the U-2 clearly were. Heppenheimer states that proponents of this satellite surveillance system therefore urged that the United States allow the USSR to be the first to orbit a satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), thereby itself establishing the precedent that overflights of other countries’ territories from space did not represent infringement of sovereign airspace.
It is in large part for this reason, Heppenheimer argues, that the U.S. government ordered the Army’s rocket program led by Wernher von Braun to halt any effort to develop a launch vehicle for the IGY capable of achieving Earth orbit. In addition, there was concern about Soviet perceptions of a scientific satellite launched for the International Geophysical Year by a military rocket program led by a former Nazi scientist. Instead, the Naval Research Laboratory, well known for its geophysical research, was chosen to develop the Vanguard scientific satellite program, based upon existing rockets that previously had been used for such scientific research rather than military purposes.
At that time, the army had already developed its Jupiter-C rocket based on the existing Redstone rocket. The Jupiter-C was far more powerful than the navy’s Vanguard program, and indeed the calculations showed that it needed only the development of a fourth stage to be able to put a small satellite into orbit. Wernher von Braun was anxious to do so, but the Heppenheimer article quotes a specific phone call to him from Major General John B. Medaris, Commander of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), and von Braun’s direct supervisor. In this September 20, 1956 call, more than one year before the Sputnik launch, Medaris is quoted as follows: “Wernher, I must put you under direct orders personally to inspect that fourth-stage to make sure it is not live.”2
Von Braun followed Medaris’s orders, and according to Heppenheimer this strategy to slow the U.S. effort so that the USSR would beat the United States into orbit worked as planned. By launching Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit, the Soviets established the international legal principle that orbiting satellites did not infringe on sovereign airspace, and this then enabled the United States to develop and deploy its ambitious space-based surveillance system known as CORONA. This system, in turn, provided the intelligence that in 1961 refuted the claims of a “missile gap” that had been so prominent in the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign.
According to Heppenheimer’s analysis, there may be doubt therefore as to whether Sputnik really did demonstrate the USSR’s superior scientific and technological prowess. There can however be no doubt that it was interpreted in this way by U.S. political leaders, the press, and public opinion. In this way, Sputnik served as a powerful catalyst for major new research and educational initiatives in science, mathematics, and engineering in the United States, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing at least into the 1970s.