Guide Note:

October 4, 2007 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the launch by the Soviet Union of Sputnik I, the world's first earth-orbiting satellite.

Fast Facts:

1. The term "sputnik" means "co-traveler" or "traveling companion"
2. Satellite inspired the term "beatnik"
3. Circled the Earth once every 98 minutes

The launch of Sputnik set off a "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Immediately after the launch, American politicians began lamenting the fact that the communist nation would be able to excel technologically over the U.S., and President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration was criticized for not focusing enough attention on the construction of the kind of long-range missiles that made sending a satellite into Earth-orbit possible.

In 1958, the U.S. government formed NASA with the aim of matching and exceeding Soviet achievements in spaceflight, but it would not be until 1963 that the U.S. would begin to surpass the U.S.S.R. in space achievements. In 1960, John F. Kennedy ran against Eisenhower's vice-president Richard Nixon on a platform that decried a "missile gap" between the U.S. and Soviet Union, a platform largely inspired by the fear that missiles like that which carried Sputnik would be able to annihilate American cities if tipped with nuclear warheads. By 1968, the U.S. was firmly in the lead in the "space race", having orbited the moon in December, and cemented a victory in the contest by landing on the moon in July of 1969.

In the fifty years since Sputnik, however, manned space exploration has stalled, although the use of robotic probes and satellites has exploded, providing the world with the telecommunications network currently in use today and the first close-up photographs and videos of all of the planets (except for Pluto.)