Sputnik Quotes (5 quotes)
I don’t think many people remember what life was like in those days. This was the era when the Russians were claiming superiority, and they could make a pretty good case—they put up Sputnik in ’57; they had already sent men into space to orbit the earth. There was this fear that perhaps communism was the wave of the future. The astronauts, all of us, really believed we were locked in a battle of democracy versus communism, where the winner would dominate the world.
As reported by Howard Wilkinson in 'John Glenn Had the Stuff U.S. Heroes are Made of', The Cincinnati Enquirer (20 Feb 2002).
Listen now for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the new.
[Introducing the beep-beep chirp transmitted by the Sputnik satellite.]
[Introducing the beep-beep chirp transmitted by the Sputnik satellite.]
NBC radio announcer on the night of 4 Oct 1957. In 'The Nation: Red Moon Over the U.S.', Time (14 Oct 1957), 70, 27.
The principal impetus for my entering a career in science … was the successful launching of Sputnik in 1957, and the then current belief that science and technology was going to be where the action was in the coming decades.
From 'Richard E. Smalley: Biographical', collected in Tore Frängsmyr (ed.), Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 1996 (1997).
The Soviet Sputnik had demonstrated what seemed a Russian breakthrough in missile technology, and the fear had taken root that … [we] were apparently becoming more and more vulnerable to missiles,… and it had become increasingly questionable whether our delivery aircraft could reach their targets—already assumed to be in the area of Moscow. This had led to the concept of a nuclear missile launched by rocket: the British deterrent ultimately … was to be such a missile, launched from an underground site. A British warhead and a British missile: Blue Streak.
In Reflect on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington (1089), 152-153.
The successful launching of the Sputnik was a demonstration of one of the highest scientific and technological achievements of man—a tantalizing invitation both to the militarist in search of ever more devastating means of destruction and to the astronomer searching for new means of carrying his instruments away from their earthbound environment.
In BBC Reith Lecture (9 Nov 1958), 'Astronomy Breaks Free', published as The Individual and the Universe (1959, 1961), 72.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
