FIFTY YEARS IN SPACE

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

by Thomas Wm. HAMILTON

The Space Age began with two announcements in 1954. The first, in April, was largely overlooked or ignored, when the Soviet Union announced an intention to launch artificial satellites into orbit around the Earth during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year. On July 28 the USA made a similar announcement. This got a lot more attention, including the potentially alarming headline in the New York Post of "SPACESHIPS!"

Two years later, on September 17, 1956 the United States launched a test firing of a Jupiter C missile from Cape Canaveral. This four stage rocket was capable of placing its final stage in orbit, but someone, never publicly identified, travelled from Washington to Cape Canaveral to assure that the final stage of the rocket had sand instead of rocket fuel in its tanks. The Jupiter C landed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa.

Another year later, on October 4, 1957 Radio Moscow broadcast an announcement from TASS News Agency that the Soviet Union had launched the first satellite into orbit. Two groups in the USA were unknowingly in a race to be the first to tape the signal of Sputnik 1 and put it on the public airwaves.

In Riverhead, Long Island, a group of radio engineers from NBC became the first Americans to hear, and record, the 0.3 second long recurrent beep of Sputnik. They then had to drive over sixty miles to Manhattan to get this on the air, and in 1957 the Long Island Expressway had not been completed. The drive took over two hours.

Meanwhile, Sputnik rose higher over America, finally clearing Manhattan's horizon. At Columbia University several students from the school's FM radio station, WKCR, took an Ampex tape recorder, weighing over thirty pounds, one block across campus to the ham radio station (one of them was an engineer involved with both stations). At the ham station, W2AEE, they recorded a couple minutes of Sputnik 1 and then lugged the Ampex and its precious recording back to WKCR's studio, where the put it on the air.

The next morning, about 9:05 am, two men came into the station, and asked to see the person in charge. The then station President asked what they wanted. They flashed credentials showing theyt were from the FBI, and asked, "Do you have a tape of that Russian [sic] thing in space that you've been broadcasting?" The response was a brag, although at this point no one yet realized that WKCR had been the first in the United States to get Sputnik on the air. "We want the tape. Now." And the FBI walked off with the tape, never to pay for it, return it, or replace it.

The following Tuesday Prof. Jan Schilt, Rutherford Professor of Astronomy and director of Columbia's Rutherford Observatory, began his introductory astronomy class with the comment "Well, gentlemen, it is not every day that we have something new in the sky to talk about." He then devoted the entire class period to proving the Soviets had deliberately launched Sputnik 1 into an orbit where it would be in space for the longest possible time before becoming visible in the USA (six weeks, as the Earth moved to a new point in its orbit and Sputnik's orbit had precessed).

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