basic sputnik

SPACE IN-SITU
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EVENT HORIZONT
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Emmanuel T. Sarris
Sputnik: Opening the Stage for Space In-Situ
Roald Sagdeev
Discovery of a New World
Lev Zeleny
‘Fiztekh’ – IKI – Further On, to the Outer Space
Mikhail Panasyuk
Radiation Reflections
Stamatios M. Krimigis
Years of remark able achievements
Anatoly Cherepaschuk
Sternberg Astronomical Institute and the beginning
of space exploration era
S. Fred Singer
The Pre-Sputnik Years and Early Sputnik Discoveries
Yuri Logachev
The Beginning of Space Era at the Skobeltsyn Institute
of Nuclear Physics
William Ian Axford
The Beginning
Bengt Hultqvist
Consequences of Sputnik
Vladimir Kurt
The first steps of our space astronomy
Yan Ziman
How the Optico-Physical Department Overcame
Consequences of ‘Perestroika’
Oleg Vaisberg
Sputnik and Something Else
Mikhail Marov
The Discovered Space
Arthur C. Clarke
Fifty Years of the Space Age: The Best is Yet to Come!
Nikolay Anfimov
Symbol of the Space EraTake-off Point
Mikhail Vinogradov
50 th Anniversary of the Artificial Earth Satellite
Susan Eisenhowerр
International Resource Available to All Nations
Tobias C. Owen
The World Since Sputnik
Leonid Gorshkov
Sputnik-1 extendedthe world boundaries
William Vernon Jones
From the Space Race to the Vision for Space
Exploration
Karoly Szego
Space, 21 st Century: Choice of Priorities
Gerhard Haerendel
Fifty Years After Sputnik —A View of a Plasma
Physicist
Eric Galimov
The most important industrial challenge
of the 21 st century
Louis Friedman
Reflections on the 50 th Anniversary of Sputnik
Gordon G. Shepherd
Reflections on the 50 Years of Space Era
Yaroslav Yatskiv
First steps of the international collaboration
in the peaceful research and exploration of space
(1957–1987)
Introduction
Right after completing the first revolution of the
First artificial satellite TASS news agency announced ‘...The first sputnik was successfully
launched in the USSR on October 4, 1957. By preliminary data,
the rocket vehicle has provided Sputnik with necessary orbital speed,
about 8000 metres per second. Now Sputnik gyrates on elliptic trajectories
round the Earth, and its flight can be observed at dawn and sunset
by means of elementary optical instruments (field-glasses, telescopes,
etc.)…’ It seemed that the entire world observed small bright point, floating in the
night sky fifty years ago, listened to simple signals ‘beep-beep’, knowing that those
sounds were sent by a new celestial body. It was extremely amazing that this celestial
body was artificial, that is created by hands of humans. Then, in the beginning of
October, 1957 billions of people suddenly felt themselves a part of mankind, citizens
of the planet Earth standing on the threshold of vast, but already becoming accessible
Universe.
Not everybody understood then the implications
of this event, but the feeling that something enormous was happening, an event
of really ‘cosmic’ scale, stayed with the almost all the people on earth. Activity of the
mankind always striving to new discoveries, conquering new frontiers developed ‘new
degree of freedom’, ‘new dimension’. This event enabled to create a new science —
space research and to pave the way to unthinkable opportunities, i.e. to look behind
dense curtain of terrestrial atmosphere and to reveal basic knowledge about the Universe,
to send robots to the bodies of the Solar system, to take a walk on the surface
of the Moon and to build feasible plans of manned flights to neighbor planet in the
nearest decades. Undoubtedly and at the same time surprisingly enough the launch
of Sputnik in the frame of International Geophysical Year 1957–1958 acquired great
meaning not only for a limited community of scientists, but also, without exaggeration,
for all mankind. That was the event which gave rise to new branches of industry
and usage of space practically in all the fields of human activity. Surprising aspect of
the Sputnik story was that space race of the Great Powers was a peaceful, ‘cold’ battle,
giving confidence to the nations, involved in this confrontation, that the third world
war was impossible. It took half a century after the first Sputnik — an instant from
the historical point of view — for dozens of countries to become members of ‘space
club’, and space exploration to become day-to-day routine.