October 4th is one of my favorite days of the year for one awesome reason – it’s the day in 1958 where the Soviet Union successfully orbited the worlds first satellite – Sputnik 1. The first in a string of amazing achievements for humanity (not just on a national level) and our first steps out into space. That little beeping metallic sphere didn’t just tell us (the United States) “hey, this really is possible” – math already proved that. It told us that we needed to get off our butts and actually get something up there of our own.
The story of how this lead to the failure of Vanguard TV3 and the later success on January 31st, 1958, of Explorer 1, is kind of legendary in its own right. It’s also interesting to me that it took just shy of a year from this event for the US to finally get a dedicated space agency in operations – NASA.
I don’t have much planned for this as I’ve covered this all before, but I wanted to at least share this video from Roskosmos regarding this anniversary. It’s good to know that Russia is still proud of this and so many other achievements they have made through the past 60 years in space.
I look at these events as human accomplishments spurred on by national competition – relics of previous conflicts that proved to accelerate humanity into the future.