Happy Birthday Sputnik, Oct 4
- Thread starter The Squire of Gothos
- Start date
As I said in this MISC thread:
But I agree with you that the event should be celebrated in this forum as opposed to MISC.
Happy Birthday, Space Age!
SCREW SPUTNIK!!!
All it was, was a watermelon sized globe with a few antennaes that transmitted a *beep*.
In terms of a close back-and-forth football game, the Soviets just happened to be the one that was ahead when time ran out.
All it was, was a watermelon sized globe with a few antennaes that transmitted a *beep*.
In terms of a close back-and-forth football game, the Soviets just happened to be the one that was ahead when time ran out.
Jesus. Revisionism, anyone?
Nobody was doing anything with outer space in 1957. Only the Americans and the Soviets were even launching sounding rockets. Science fiction was for pulp magazines and B movies only. Standard were ray guns and beautiful damsels in distress (OK, somethings haven't changed
). The American space program couldn't get out of its own way, having backed the wrong program in the Navy's Vanguard launch vehicle, which when it eventually worked only managed to launch a grapefruit sized globe that emitted a tone instead of a beep.
What the Russians did was revolutionary. All of a sudden a brand new book was taken off of the shelf to read. Horizons were opened.
A ball that goes beep isn't good enough for you? Then wait a month and celebrate the launch of Laika in Sputnik 2. It has been pretty well documented that with Sputnik 1's success, Khrushchev ordered Korolov and his staff back from vacation and told them he wanted something better right away. Within a month, they designed, built and launched a capsule that kept a dog alive in space for many days. Is that impressive enough? The Americans didn't launch Explorer 1 for another two months.
Yes, one of the two powers would have done it within a year. But the Soviets did it first and best. You can't discount that.
Nobody was doing anything with outer space in 1957. Only the Americans and the Soviets were even launching sounding rockets. Science fiction was for pulp magazines and B movies only. Standard were ray guns and beautiful damsels in distress (OK, somethings haven't changed
). The American space program couldn't get out of its own way, having backed the wrong program in the Navy's Vanguard launch vehicle, which when it eventually worked only managed to launch a grapefruit sized globe that emitted a tone instead of a beep.What the Russians did was revolutionary. All of a sudden a brand new book was taken off of the shelf to read. Horizons were opened.
A ball that goes beep isn't good enough for you? Then wait a month and celebrate the launch of Laika in Sputnik 2. It has been pretty well documented that with Sputnik 1's success, Khrushchev ordered Korolov and his staff back from vacation and told them he wanted something better right away. Within a month, they designed, built and launched a capsule that kept a dog alive in space for many days. Is that impressive enough? The Americans didn't launch Explorer 1 for another two months.
Yes, one of the two powers would have done it within a year. But the Soviets did it first and best. You can't discount that.
The Soviets also had a leg up on the US for two reasons:
1) Sergei Korolev, the master of the Soviet space program, was Wernher Von Braun, Chris Kraft, and James Webb all rolled into one. When he died, their program floundered quite quickly.
2) The Soviets got ahead in the manned program because they were less concerned about safety than the Americans. The Voskhod (two-man) spacecraft was a Vostok (their one-man) with most of the interior stripped out to allow two men to fit inside. Alexei Leonov also nearly died on his spacewalk because his suit inflated and he couldn't get through the much smaller (than Gemini) Voskhod hatch.
However, after 1966, the Soviets had no realistic chance of beating the US. The Soyuz was nearly ready, but the L-1 lunar rocket failed on every test flight, mainly because it had 30+ engines on the first stage (instead of the Saturn V's five each on the first two stages) were never tested as a group before installation. The Saturn V, on the other hand, needed only one test flight before it was rated ready for manned flight, as the fixes for the problems in that mission were ironed out in ground tests of the F-1 and J-2 engines at Huntsville.
1) Sergei Korolev, the master of the Soviet space program, was Wernher Von Braun, Chris Kraft, and James Webb all rolled into one. When he died, their program floundered quite quickly.
2) The Soviets got ahead in the manned program because they were less concerned about safety than the Americans. The Voskhod (two-man) spacecraft was a Vostok (their one-man) with most of the interior stripped out to allow two men to fit inside. Alexei Leonov also nearly died on his spacewalk because his suit inflated and he couldn't get through the much smaller (than Gemini) Voskhod hatch.
However, after 1966, the Soviets had no realistic chance of beating the US. The Soyuz was nearly ready, but the L-1 lunar rocket failed on every test flight, mainly because it had 30+ engines on the first stage (instead of the Saturn V's five each on the first two stages) were never tested as a group before installation. The Saturn V, on the other hand, needed only one test flight before it was rated ready for manned flight, as the fixes for the problems in that mission were ironed out in ground tests of the F-1 and J-2 engines at Huntsville.
While I agree with the tenor of your post, your facts are a little messed up.
1) The Soviet moon rocket was the N-1.
2) It was a poor design but don't blame the number of rockets. The backbone of the Russian space program, the very reliable Soyuz booster, uses a ton of engines. It is their way.
3) The Saturn V took two flights before it was man rated. The second one was only a qualified success.
4) That the Soviets were less concerned about safety is debatable. They took risks; we took risks. It turned out using a pure oxygen environment in the spacecraft was an incredible risk the Americans took and the Apollo 1 crew of Grissom, White and Chaffee paid the price with their lives. The Soviets have always flown using an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. The Soviets could have sent a man to the moon without the N-1 but they were dubious that they could get him back. They didn't try. The United States took a terrible risk in sending the first man rated Saturn V to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 in what is generally now regarded as a space race publicity stunt. Even Neil Armstrong was somewhat surprised when he actually landed on the moon. He judged their chances of success at 50/50. Spaceflight was, and remains, a risky business. The Americans and the Russians just took different risks.
I'll pass for now on your comments on the Saturn V being tested all-up. I am currently reading a fascinating book, Stages To Saturn, and that is covered in the last chapter. It was a hell of a risk testing the Saturn V all-up for its first flight. For whatever reasons, we won that gamble and with the N-1, the Soviets failed.
1) The Soviet moon rocket was the N-1.
2) It was a poor design but don't blame the number of rockets. The backbone of the Russian space program, the very reliable Soyuz booster, uses a ton of engines. It is their way.
3) The Saturn V took two flights before it was man rated. The second one was only a qualified success.
4) That the Soviets were less concerned about safety is debatable. They took risks; we took risks. It turned out using a pure oxygen environment in the spacecraft was an incredible risk the Americans took and the Apollo 1 crew of Grissom, White and Chaffee paid the price with their lives. The Soviets have always flown using an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. The Soviets could have sent a man to the moon without the N-1 but they were dubious that they could get him back. They didn't try. The United States took a terrible risk in sending the first man rated Saturn V to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 in what is generally now regarded as a space race publicity stunt. Even Neil Armstrong was somewhat surprised when he actually landed on the moon. He judged their chances of success at 50/50. Spaceflight was, and remains, a risky business. The Americans and the Russians just took different risks.
I'll pass for now on your comments on the Saturn V being tested all-up. I am currently reading a fascinating book, Stages To Saturn, and that is covered in the last chapter. It was a hell of a risk testing the Saturn V all-up for its first flight. For whatever reasons, we won that gamble and with the N-1, the Soviets failed.
GodThingFormerly
A Different Kind of Asshole
^ Yes, but we had better Germans.
TGT, you should read this article about Mikhail Tikhonravov. He was Korolov's right hand man and maybe a better engineer. It is from the latest issue of Air and Space Magazine, put out by the Smithsonian Institute.
This is also a fascinating site: Russian Space Web. This is their coverage of Sputnik.
TGT, you should read this article about Mikhail Tikhonravov. He was Korolov's right hand man and maybe a better engineer. It is from the latest issue of Air and Space Magazine, put out by the Smithsonian Institute.
This is also a fascinating site: Russian Space Web. This is their coverage of Sputnik.
The use of pure oxygen in flight was not the issue, as after launch in later Apollo flights the cabin was filled with pure oxygen; it was using 16 psi of oxygen on the ground to simulate the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level. Soviet cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko was killed in a similar training accident.
I knew that.
I should have clarified myself - it wasn't the number of engines but rather the fact that they were never tested as a group before being used on the N-1.
I knew that too. I just forgot about Apollo 4 last night.
I was under the impression that the 'all-up' test referred to the whole Saturn V stack being used on Apollo 4, rather than testing each stage individually. The F-1 and J-2 engines had still been tested as a group repeatedly in Huntsville, and it was the ground test results on the fixes to the post-Apollo 6 J-2 engines that lead them to take a chance on Apollo 8.
I will concede your point about NASA being less concerned about safety later on. Unfortunately, NASA has a culture where they become slacker and slacker on safety until a tragedy occurs, which then snaps them back into safety mode for awhile. The Challenger accident was a case-in-point of this. However, at the beginning of the space program, the Soviets were cutting all sorts of corners to one-up the US. And they got away with it thanks to Korolev.
And James Tiberius Kirk made an excellent point about the Apollo 1 accident. And poor Bondarenko shows why it was much better that Grissom, White, and Chaffee died quickly. The poor man lived for sixteen hours before he died, and was so badly burnt that the only place the doctors could find to put in an IV was the sole of his foot.
Finally, curse you for the link to that book, Outpost4. That's another $27 I'm spending this month.
Sputnik was an incredible achievement for its time...happy birthday Sputnit.
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