Blessings of Sputnik

The boost it gave 50 years ago to US science is needed again today.

By Charles A. Stevenson

from the October 4, 2007 edition

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University Park, Md. - The Russians helped send me to Harvard University at the height of the cold war, and I'm very grateful.

I'm not revealing any classified information, or confessing to un-American thoughts or behaviors. I was just one of thousands of beneficiaries of the American response to a shocking event that occurred 50 years ago this week.

On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first space satellite, called Sputnik 1. It weighed only 184 pounds, but it demonstrated technology and rocket power that few thought the Russians had. By contrast, the first planned US satellite was the grapefruit-sized Vanguard, weighing three pounds.

A month later, the Russians sent a dog into orbit in a satellite weighing 1,121 pounds. The space race was on, and the United States was losing.

The American people were shocked by Sputnik, as were many political leaders. Republican Sen. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire warned, "The time has clearly come to be less concerned with the depth of the pile on the new broadloom rug or the height of the tail fin on the car and to be more prepared to shed blood, sweat, and tears if this country and the free world are to survive."

At first, the politicians played their usual games, with Democrats holding hearings to expose delays and mismanagement in US programs and with Republicans trying to reassure the American people that the United States was still strong. But very soon, leaders from both parties came together in a measured, deliberate, yet broad response.

President Eisenhower listened to the ominous report of a panel of scientists and defense experts – the Gaither Committee – and adopted many of its recommendations. He added 4 percent to his defense budget, accelerated US missile programs, and increased the planned size of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force by 62 percent. To guard against surprise Soviet attacks, he ordered greater dispersal of US bombers as well as the start of a limited airborne alert bomber force.

These steps helped to close what otherwise might have been a dangerous "missile gap," although that wasn't fully recognized until 1961. By then, in fact, the gap was in favor of the United States.

US leaders didn't stop with military measures. They also strengthened America's scientific capabilities by creating the civilian space agency, NASA, tripling funds for the National Science Foundation, and naming a presidential science advisor.

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