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.
3 thoughts on “Insidious Soviets Produce World’s First Mechanical Moon”
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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.
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)
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).