When was sputnik made

Students Doing Tons of Homework. Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system.

Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U. The U. The first U. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late s and early s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon.

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The Soviets also had a head start with the pioneering rocket work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. A year after the launch of Sputnik, U. This competition in technological development would lead to the Moon landing, space shuttle , and International Space Station, which still orbits Earth today.

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These were all questions Americans asked in the months following the beach ball-sized satellite's trip into Earth orbit. The satellite projects took place under the backdrop of the Cold War, a lengthy time — from the late s to at least the late s, historians generally say — when relations were tense between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Soviets and the Americans worked on their rocket programs with the help of separate groups of German engineers. During World War II, the Germans had developed ballistic missiles, which were used to lob attacks on London, so their expertise in rocket work was valuable. At the war's end, both countries scooped up as many of these rocket scientists as they could.

The United States' most famous German engineer was Wernher Von Braun , who later was chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon between and In the United States, satellite development started as early as , when the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics began working on a satellite design to send aloft scientific hardware; a year later, the RAND Corporation under commission from the Air Force began research on a "World-Circling Space Ship" that could have taken a satellite into space as early as , Zak wrote.

However, Zak added, the U. In the Soviet Union, the first rocket efforts came under the leadership of Mikhail Tikhonravov, Zak wrote. Tikhonravov was deputy chief of the top-secret NII-4 research institution in Moscow, which was formed shortly after World War II to start work on a Soviet satellite project.

Tikhonravov's team's work drew little attention when he made presentations on it within NII-4 and at the Soviet Union's Academy of Artillery Sciences, but Tikhonravov persisted with the work. However, Tikhonravov's efforts did get the attention of Sergei Korolev , a famous Soviet rocket designer who was working on the R-3 rocket. Korolev, Tikhonravov and others in the team continued development and presentations through the early s.

Khrushchev emphasized rocket development as one of his policies to show superiority over the United States in aerospace, Zak said. The Soviet Academy of Sciences and several Soviet ministers formally approved the satellite program in , laying the groundwork for more focused development, Zak said.

The satellite project received even more support after U. President Dwight Eisenhower announced in that the Americans would send a satellite into space during IGY, which lasted from July 1, , to December 31, The Sputnik project was formally approved by the Soviet ministry on Jan. The Soviets continued refining their design for launch on an R-7 rocket. Sputnik "traveling companion" in Russian was a silver sphere with four long antennas.

It was about 22 inches 56 centimeters in diameter and weighed lbs.