Sputnik crisis

Soviet stamp depicting Sputnik's orbit around Earth

The Sputnik crisis is the name for the American reaction to the success of the Sputnik program. It was a key event during the Cold War that began on October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite.

The United States had held itself to be the world leader in space technology and missile development.^{[citation needed]} However, the appearance of Sputnik I and the failure of the first two U.S. launch attempts rattled the American public. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the shock the “Sputnik Crisis” because of the looming threat of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, America was in a state of fear from the Soviet Union. Once the Soviets started to launch satellites into orbit, even a payload harmless to the U.S., the concern increased. If the USSR could launch a satellite, it could also launch a nuclear warhead able to travel intercontinental distances.

Less than a year after the Sputnik launch, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The act was a four-year program that poured billions of dollars into the U.S. education system. In 1953 the government spent $153 million, colleges took $10 million of that funding; however, by 1960 the combined funding grew almost sixfold because of the NDEA.

US Rep. Clare Boothe Luce referred to Sputnik's beeps as "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."^{[citation needed]}

After the initial public shock, the Space Race began, leading to the first human launched into space, Project Apollo and the first manned moon landing in 1969.^{[citation needed]}

US response

The Sputnik crisis spurred a series of U.S. initiatives, many initiated by the Department of Defense:^{[citation needed]}

• Within two days, calculation of the Sputnik orbit (joint work by UIUC Astronomy Dept. and Digital Computer Lab).
• Increased emphasis on the Navy's existing Project Vanguard to launch an American satellite into orbit, and a revival of the Army's Explorer program that preceded Vanguard in launching the first American satellite into orbit on January 31, 1958.
• By February 1958, the political and defense communities had recognized the need for a high-level Department of Defense organization to execute R&D projects and created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.
• On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA.
• Education programs were initiated to foster a new generation of engineers.
• Increased support for scientific research. For 1959, Congress increased the National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriation to $134 million, almost $100 million higher than the year before. By 1968, the NSF budget would stand at nearly $500 million.
• The Polaris missile program
• Project management as an area of inquiry and an object of much scrutiny, leading up to the modern concept of project management and standardized project models such as the DoD Program Evaluation and Review Technique, PERT, invented for Polaris.
• The decision by President John F. Kennedy, who campaigned in 1960 on closing the "missile gap", to deploy 1,000 Minuteman missiles, far more ICBMs than the Soviets had at the time.

References

Layman, Richard. "National Defence Education Act of 1958." American Decades 1950–1959. 6th ed. 1994.

External links

• Roger D. Launius: Sputnik and the Origins of the Space Age, nasa.gov