One could make a case that the United States should have been the first.
If Wernher von Braun and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency had been allowed to attempt the launch instead of the Vanguard rocket, it's hypothetically possible that it would have been an American satellite that rocked the world in 1957 instead of the "beep beep beep" of the Soviet Sputnik.
But regardless of what would have been hypothetically possible, it wasn't.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union made history by launching the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit. The space race had officially begun, and the United States was losing out, straight out of the gate.
If you can't be the first, be the best.
It would be almost four entire months before the United States answered the challenge issued by Sputnik. But when we did, we did so in style.
On January 31, 1958, the United States launched the Explorer 1 satellite atop the Juno I rocket, derived from the Redstone missile developed by the ABMA at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.
The original Sputnik was basically a dumb ball, its most important piece of research equipment being a transmitter. Scientists were able to learn more about Earth's atmosphere from Sputnik, but primarily by observing its orbital path and changes in the reception of its signal. The next
month, the Soviet Union's Sputnik 2 satellite did carry a payload -- the first living creature to fly aboard an orbiting spacecraft -- a dog, Laika. But accurate information on what the (short-lived) Laika experienced on her flight was not available outside the Soviet Union until decades later.
Unlike the first Sputnik, the United States' first satellite served far more purpose than just putting an object in orbit. The rocket team solicited the involvement of scientific researchers, under the leadership of the University of Iowa's Dr. James Van Allen, who developed a battery of scientific experiments. As a result, the satellite produced a wealth of knowledge, including what is considered on of the most important discoveries of the International Geophysical year during which it and Sputnik were launched -- a concentrated area of radioactive particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field, today known as the Van Allen Belt.
"If you can't be the first ..." would prove to be an ongoing theme during the space race of the 1950s and '60s. The Soviet Union would continue to rack up first after first -- first man in orbit, first spacewalk, first flight of multiple people, etc. -- with the U.S. put in the place of trying to top those first. If we can't conduct a spacewalk first, we have to do it better. If we can't be the first to put multiple people in one spacecraft, we have to do it better. Finally, in 1969, all
the effort the United States had to put into doing things better finally paid off with a "game-winning" first -- the first footsteps on the lunar surface.
Visitors to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center can get a close-up look at what was involved in the U.S.' formal entry into the space race with Explorer I as part of the current Wernher von Braun special exhibit. Among the highlights is the control panel used for the Explorer I
launch.
It's a unique opportunity to see the controls that not only launched a historic satellite, but that literally launched the United States into the Space Age.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
