Insidious Soviets Produce World’s First Mechanical Moon
Jason Ditz,
October 04, 2007
Christian Science Monitor dug deep into their archives to find a very cool article from 1957. Here we are, 50 years later, and the weaponization of space continues to be a bone of contention between the United States and Russia.
R. Nelson
October 5th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Funny that I have to stumble across a 50 year old article to finally understand what is meant by “escape velocity.” The term never made sense to me because, given continual thrust, a rocket going up at a right angle to earth would leave earth’s gravity eventually even at 1 mph, let alone 25,000. The Monitor makes it all clear. Thanks Jason.
El Tonno
October 5th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Shouldn’t that be “industrious Soviets”? Look at the huge intercontinental weapon delivery system that brought the ball into orbit, aka. the “R-7″, designed by a prison camp survivor, no less, aka. Sergei Korolev.
“Short of stature, heavily built, with head sitting awkward on his body, with brown eyes glistening with intelligence, he was a skeptic, a cynic and a pessimist who took the gloomiest view of the future. ‘We will all vanish without a trace’ was his favorite expression.” (from the Wikipedia)
Jason Ditz
October 6th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I suppose that was pretty industrious of them too… I was just trying to get into the spirit of late 1950′s, House Un-American Activities Committee style Cold War paranoia (which admittedly, by the time I was a kid, was reduced to campy 1980′s Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn style Cold War paranoia).