Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century: “Humanity will not remain forever on Earth, but in pursuit of light and space it will first timidly advance beyond the atmosphere, and then conquer the entire near-solar space.”
It was not the desire for light that helped to overcome human timidity, but on the contrary, the desire to avoid it. No one wanted to repeat the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which burned down in a nuclear fire in August 1945.
The history of the creation of Sputnik is a story about an arms race. About the attempt to prevent the Third World War, which threatened to be the last for modern civilization.
On October 4, 1957, the world’s first artificial Earth satellite went into Earth orbit. The rocket with the satellite rose from the 5th Research Test Site of the USSR Ministry of Defense, which later became the Baikonur cosmodrome.
The satellite was a ball with two antennas stacked crosswise, a transmitter and a battery. Dimensions of the device: ball diameter: 58 cm, antenna length: 240 cm and 290 cm, weight: 83.6 kg.
295 seconds after the launch the central block of the rocket was placed into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 947 km and a perigee of 288 km . At the 315th second of the flight Sputnik separated from the second stage of the launch vehicle and sent the call signs on the air. Sputnik spent 92 days in orbit, until January 4, 1958, made 1,440 revolutions around the Earth, covered a distance of 60 million kilometers.
But the main achievement at the launch of Sputnik was not the satellite itself, (one of the designers of OKB-1, Boris Chertok, spoke about the complexity of the satellite as follows: “Its internal electrical circuit is so elementary that any group of young technicians can easily reproduce it.”
The main achievement of the launch was the rocket, the R-7, an upgraded ballistic carrier of nuclear charges.
The design of the rocket began at OKB-1 in 1953. The designers had an incredible goal: to create an intercontinental ballistic missile (IBM) capable of carrying a charge at a distance of up to 10,000 kilometers. To achieve this goal a cosmodrome was built in Kazakhstan in two years. By the summer of the 1956 the layout was developed and mass-dimensional models of IBMs were manufactured. In December of the same year the first flight product was assembled.
The first launch of the R-7 took place in May 1957. Distance: 300 kilometers, flight duration: 98 seconds.
Three months later, on August 21, 1957, just a few weeks before Sputnik, the first successful test launch of the R-7 took place. The rocket covered a distance of 6,314 kilometers. This is how the first IBM appeared in the world.
Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, chief designer and leading engineer of the Soviet space program, proposed using the R-7 rocket back in 1954 (design work on the rocket was completed in 53), but the proposal did not find support.
In 1955, a program to launch a satellite into Earth orbit began to be developed in the United States. The desire of the USSR to win in the space race helped Korolev to obtain consent for his own project and on August 8, 1955, Korolev’s Sputnik was approved.
The satellite itself was developed by the team of Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov. It took less than a month to create the device. From a technical point of view Sputnik was a mass-sized dummy of the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
In total, the R-7 family of missiles have been in operation for more than half a century. The design of the rocket received about a hundred improvements. Improved versions of the R-7 had a flight range of up to 12,000 kilometers. Soyuz launch vehicles delivered crews to the ISS in the 21st century. Engineering and design solutions used in the creation of the rocket allowed modern Russia to use the intellectual achievements of the USSR for more than three decades.
