Sputnik

Sputnik Sputtering: Then As Now | Emperor‘s New Clothes

Sputnik Ignited Fears That an Unprotected U.S. Would Be Annihilated From Space
“Ironically, the Soviets weren’t initially boastful about Sputnik; and it was only after witnessing the stunned American response that they used it as “proof” that they were the wave of the future and American was about to land in the dustbin of history.”

Sputnik's Impact on America | PBS NOVA
The vast majority of people living today, at the beginning of the 21st century, were born after Sputnik was launched and may be unaware of the degree to which it helped shape life as we know it....
Americans who had struggled through the Great Depression and the war embraced the promise of a burgeoning middle class having goods, services, and comforts that formerly had been the province of European royalty. The average family's car had more pure horsepower than existed in all the stables of Buckingham Palace a generation earlier....
By 1957, a new world was at hand for the United States. The country was creating an interstate highway system; the suburbs were growing; families with two cars and color televisions were becoming the norm. The highest peacetime federal budget in history ($71.8 billion) was in place, and it was the first year in which more than 1,000 computers would be built, bought, and shipped. There were advances in public health, although none more stunning than Dr. Jonas Salk's discovery of a vaccine against polio, the scourge of an entire generation of children.
At the same time, social changes were beginning to transform the United States. A great struggle to achieve a more egalitarian society was beginning. The first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction had been enacted in Congress on September 9, less than a month before Sputnik's launch. The Arkansas National Guard was in Little Rock, Arkansas, enforcing the right of blacks to go to school with whites. Culturally as well, the country was moving to a different beat. Rock 'n' roll had come onto the scene, and Elvis Presley owned the summer of 1957 with his two-sided monster hit record of "Don't Be Cruel" and "Hound Dog"....
Just when Americans were feeling self-confident and optimistic about the future, along came the crude, kerosene-powered Sputnik launch. The space race was under way, and the Soviets had won the first leg—the United States was agog and unnerved....
There was a sudden crisis of confidence in American technology, values, politics, and the military. Science, technology, and engineering were totally reworked and massively funded in the shadow of Sputnik. The Russian satellite essentially forced the United States to place a new national priority on research science, which led to the development of microelectronics—the technology used in today's laptop, personal, and handheld computers. Many essential technologies of modern life, including the Internet, owe their early development to the accelerated pace of applied research triggered by Sputnik....
On another level, Sputnik affected national attitudes toward conspicuous consumption as well, symbolically killing off the market for the Edsel automobile and the decadent automotive tail fin. It was argued that the engineering talents of the nation were being wasted on frivolities. Americans, wrote historian Samuel Flagg Bemis from the vantage point of 1962, "had been experiencing the world crisis from soft seats of comfort, debauched by [the] mass media..., pandering for selfish profit to the lowest level of our easy appetites, fed full of toys and gewgaws, our power, our manpower softened in will and body in a climate of amusement."...
Sputnik also changed people's lives in ways that filtered into modern popular culture. Sputnik was the instrument that gave Stephen King the "dread" that fuels his novels, caused the prolific Isaac Asimov to begin calling himself a science writer rather than a science fiction writer, inspired Ross Perot to create an electronics dynasty, and led others to become cosmonauts and astronauts....
Politically, Sputnik created a perception of American weakness, complacency, and a "missile gap," which led to bitter accusations, resignations of key military figures, and contributed to the election of John F. Kennedy, who emphasized the space gap and the role of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration in creating it. But although the Sputnik episode publicly depicted Eisenhower as passive and unconcerned, he was fiercely dedicated to averting nuclear war at a time when the threat was very real. His concern for national security took precedence over any concerns about beating the Russians into Earth orbit.
Without Sputnik, it is all but certain that there would not have been a race to the moon.
When Kennedy as president decided to put Americans on the moon, he did so with the belief that voters who had been kids at the time of Sputnik were more willing than their parents to pay the high price of going into space.
Diplomatically, Sputnik helped realign the United States and Great Britain as allies. For a decade, ties between the two nations had weakened partly due to the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, which had deprived the United Kingdom of American nuclear secrets, and partly because of the strong position that the United States had taken against the British and French during the Suez Crisis, which had been prompted by Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal in July 1956. Now with the common threat of Soviet power implied by Sputnik, NATO was strengthened, guaranteeing the placement of American nuclear arms in Europe. The satellite touched off a superpower competition that may well have acted as a surrogate contest for universal power—perhaps even a stand-in for nuclear world war....
National insecurity, wounded national pride, infighting, political grandstanding, clandestine plots, and ruthless media frenzy were but a few of the things the United States had to overcome to bounce back from the blow dealt to the nation by Sputnik.”

Sputnik

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