Sputnik’s Anniversary – Looking Back at 66 Years of Spaceflight

Article September 30, 2023

A technician working on the satellite Sputnik 1. Credit: Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

October 4 marks the 66^th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first thing that humans ever successfully sent into space. Anniversaries feel like an appropriate time for a good retrospective, and the Sputnik anniversary is a big one for us space nerds. So I figured I’d whip up a little space nostalgia and take a (brief and incomplete) look at where we’ve come since Sputnik, and where we hope to go next.

Surely I can succinctly sum up sixty-six years of achievements in space. I can. Right? Right?

Dawn of the Space Age

Sputnik 1 blasted off of the Earth from the southwestern lobe of the Soviet Union in the darkest hours of an early October night in 1957. At the launch site it was already October 5, but in Moscow (and the United States) it was still October 4, so this is the date that is commemorated as the day the first artificial satellite was put into space. It wasn’t much: a metal ball about two feet across with some antennae and a radio transmitter. Altogether it weighed 184 pounds.

The inner workings of Sputnik 1. Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty

Its launch triggered momentous celebrations in the Soviet Union and panic in the United States, as the plaintive “beep-beep” emitted by the metal beach ball was heard the world over every time it completed one of its 98-minute orbits. Sputnik 1 would “beep-beep” for 22 days, all told.

Sputnik 2, the world’s second artificial satellite, launched on November 3. It was far beefier, weighing over 1,000 pounds. What’s more, it carried an occupant, Laika, a small dog who became the first living creature to fly into space. She also, sadly, became the first creature to die there, perishing from overheating hours into the flight. It wouldn’t be until February 1958 that the US would follow with Explorer 1, a squib of a satellite even smaller than Sputnik 1. But now the race was on.

Onward and Upward

The far side of the Moon as seen for the first time from Luna 3. Credit: NASA/USSR

In July of 1958 the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was reorganized into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in October of that year the baby NASA attempted its first launch, apparently deciding to go big by heading straight for the Moon. The mission was called Pioneer 1. It, uh, didn’t make it. But it opened the lunar floodgates, and a whole bunch of missions were launched to try and enter orbit around or to impact the surface of the Moon.

The Moon made a nice, big, silvery target in our sky, but it was also a source of mystery. We just didn’t know that much about it at that time. Two years after Sputnik 1, Luna 3 became the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon. It was the first time humans had ever seen images of the far side and it didn’t look like we expected it to. We’ve been puzzling about it ever since.

The Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JHU Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko

The first interplanetary missions began shortly thereafter. In 1962 NASA began launching its Mariner series of spacecraft that would provide our first glimpses of our neighboring planets while the Soviet Venera spacecraft remain the only things to ever successfully land on Venus. The 1970s saw the launches of our first interstellar explorers, Voyager 1 and 2, which are still going outward to this day.

Since then, we’ve put spacecraft into orbit around Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, a few asteroids, some comets, the Sun, and the Moon. We’ve flown past any number of objects, including Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Arrokoth.

We’ve landed successfully on the Moon, Venus, Mars, and the Saturnian moon Titan. We have self-driving rovers on the surface of Mars. We’ve brought samples home from distant asteroids and hope to bring them home from Mars one day.

We’ve covered a lot of ground, from brushing the surface of the Sun (Parker Solar Probe) to tasting the winds of other stars (Voyagers 1 and 2) via our robotic explorers, with big plans for the future. Meanwhile, our human spaceflights have stuck much closer to home.

One Small Step

Around 1960, while satellites were getting bigger and more complicated, the space agencies of the world’s competing superpowers were looking ahead to the next big challenge: putting humans in space. Spring of 1961 saw this achieved, with Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight on April 12, followed by Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5.

Here’s where I like to take a moment to put into perspective just how ridiculously crazy the Space Race was. I just told you that the first thing ever to go into space went up in late 1957. Less than four years later we put humans up there for 1 hour and 48 minutes with Gagarin’s flight. Alan Shepard’s flight lasted 15 minutes. It was with this grand total collective experience in human spaceflight under our belts that John F. Kennedy declared we would reach the Moon before December 31, 1969.

And somehow we did it.

Less than twelve years after sending the wee ball of “beep-beep” that was Sputnik 1 on a rocky ride to low orbit, and only eight years after the first tentative human flights (and heck, you know what? Only sixty-six years after the Wright brothers flew the first powered airplane a grand total of 120 feet over the sands of Kitty Hawk), Neil Armstrong put his boot on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon as photographed by Neil Armstrong. Credit: NASA

In that puny amount of time we mastered weeks-long human flights, orbital rendezvous between spacecraft, the first spacewalks, and the first trips to lunar orbit by human beings. We also saw losses along the way, most notably the crew of Apollo 1, who was killed in a fire during a training run, and Vladimir Komarov, who died when his capsule, Soyuz 1, failed to open its parachutes during, both in 1967. The world also lost its first space traveler, Yuri Gagarin, to a plane crash in 1968.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin departed from the surface of the Moon, they left behind an Apollo 1 mission patch and a pair of medals commemorating Komarov and Gagarin.

After Apollo 11, six more missions to the Moon would follow, with five being successful (I could tell you about Apollo 13, but you should just watch the movie, it’s excellent). Humans last set foot on the Moon when Gene Cernan stepped up the ladder to his landing module on Apollo 17 in December 1972. As he left, he uttered a hope that humanity would soon return.

After the Moon

The Soviet space station Salyut 7. Credit: Crew of Soyuz T-13

With the Space Race supposedly over, both NASA and the Soviet Space Program turned their attention to new challenges: space stations for Russia, the Space Shuttle for NASA. The first space station, the Soviets’ Salyut 1, was launched in October 1971. It wasn’t much, just a single module, and it didn’t last long, about six months. It wasn’t until Salyuts 6 and 7 that these stations reliably lasted for years and hosted multiple crews over long periods, proving that humans can operate in space for months at a time.

NASA dabbled in space stations, recycling parts from unused Moon rockets to create Skylab, but its main attention in this era was on developing a reusable space vehicle, the Space Shuttle. In some ways the Shuttle program, which included 135 flights from 1981-2011, had a painfully expensive cost. Of the five shuttles that were built two were lost in flight, Challenger on the way up to space and Columbia on the way back down. 14 astronauts died with them.

The Space Shuttle Challenger in flight. Credit: NASA

But without the Shuttle the world’s modern space programs would have stalled in infancy. It was integral to building the ISS, deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and sent the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. It also played a key role in the first major space partnership between the US and Russia, known as the Shuttle-Mir program.

Mir, the first multi-modular space station. Credit: NASA

Mir was the first space station designed to grow, being made of multiple modules instead of just one.

Its first piece launched in 1986 and it was added to over a decade. It hosted the single longest flight in space, Valeri Polyakov’s stay of 437 days and 18 hours. After the creation of Shuttle-Mir by NASA and Roscosmos, which replaced the Soviet Space Program, Mir hosted astronauts and cosmonauts from 12 nations and set the scene for future international cooperation in space. By its final years Mir had more or less decayed into a flying deathtrap, but without Mir, you don’t get the ISS.

The International Space Station

I feel like the level of achievement that is represented by the ISS gets sadly overlooked. After all, it’s both old and old hat at this point. But take a moment to think about it—this thing is among the most intricate, complex, and breathtaking pieces of human engineering ever created. It’s the size of a football field, made up of sixteen pressurized modules assembled through the combined efforts of fifteen different countries and five space agencies.

It’s hard to imagine getting a project like the ISS started today. Some of the nations involved in its building barely speak to each other these days. And yet the ISS is about the only place these days where Russia still plays nice with the rest of the world. The lives of the station’s residents demand it. 273 individuals from 21 different countries have flown on this orbital laboratory, so far.

The International Space Station, the largest artificial satellite ever created. Credit: NASA

The engineering is also a marvel! Pieces and parts built by several different countries all fitting together and functioning like a charm in the still-growing collective that is the ISS. The occasional issue aside, the ISS has functioned safely for almost 25 years and has hosted humans aboard continuously for 22 of those years. Don’t even get me started on the science that’s been conducted on the station in that time, it’s a whole article on its own. A long one.

And, aside from everything else, the ISS is beautiful. The magnificence of its solar panels extending outward make it seem like some sort of giant mythical bird with its wings outspread above our planet. For loveliness it can only be surpassed by the exquisitely graceful lines of the Space Shuttle (which was, whatever else you can say about it, an enchanting sight to behold). Is this important to the history of spaceflight? No, not at all. But the beauty of science and engineering is always worth noting.

What’s Next?

The ISS’s days are numbered. As of now the plan is to keep humans aboard the ISS until 2030, and then bring it down in a controlled deorbit in 2031. Meanwhile, NASA and its international partners would reaaaaallly like to go back to the Moon. That’s what Project Artemis is all about. This time, though, they want to stay there. They want a Moon base. They are designing Gateway, a small space station for lunar orbit. They’ve got a whole lineup of flights planned. And that’s the government side.

Private spaceflight has blossomed in the last few years in a way that would have been completely impossible to anticipate in the early 2000s. Already private companies are sending spacecraft to the ISS, and many a company has a pie-in-the-sky dream about a private space station. Which of these will come to fruition remains to be seen, but the ambition is there.

For NASA, it’s all ultimately in service of putting humans on Mars. To do so will be a feat of international cooperation and engineering to surpass even the ISS. At the moment such a thing feels out of reach, but in the future? Who knows? NASA would have us believe that the Mars Generation, those who will see humans walk on the surface of the Red Planet, walk among us today, and there are days when I watch the ISS pass over or read the latest discovery from one our interplanetary probes that I fully believe it.

And to think it all started with a metal beach ball that said “beep-beep”. Happy Anniversary!

(This was as succinct as I could make it, I swear!)