Sixty years ago this month, the Space Age was born in an event that convulsed the West and threatened to alter the global balance of power. It's a story intrigue, politics, diplomacy and technology on the bleeding edge that pivots on the rivalry of two superpowers and of two men – one of whom was unaware of the other's existence. It's the story of the first manmade object to orbit the Earth, the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1.
The idea of an artificial satellite is one of the first and most basic steps when it comes to the conquest of space. It was the stuff of such visionaries as Russia's Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Germany's Hermann Oberth, America's Robert Goddard and more, who all contributed to the theory and technology of how to create outposts circling the Earth that would act as the first step to the stars.
For the first half of the 20th century, the primitive state of electronics and telemetry made most engineers assume that satellites would be large manned space stations and not a constellation of small, automated instrument packages like those we have today. But that didn't stop many enthusiasts from working on the first and most fundamental problem of how to put any object into orbit.
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