The First Artificial Satellite Reached Earth Orbit 60 Years Ago. What Did It Change for All of Us?

From the political space race to the commercial space economy, it all began with the string of beeps Sputnik sent out after it reached space in 1957.

On the evening of October 4, 1957, a satellite the size of a beach volleyball lifted off from Baikonur, a desert city in Kazakhstan that was once the Soviet Union's spaceport. It settled into low Earth orbit and began circling the planet as the planet circled the sun. It was named Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion."

Sputnik came around once every 90-odd minutes, moving at 18,000 miles an hour, and the radio transmitter bolted inside it sent out a string of beeps as it went. People on the ground followed its every move through binoculars. When word of the launch reached Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, he and his son Sergei happily switched on the radio to listen to the satellite beep, then went back to bed. "We had no idea," Sergei recalled, "how much the world would be shaken in the hours that followed."

Until then the Earth had turned alone in the universe. Sputnik's arrival was "like a spark flickering on the horizon" — the moment humanity first broke the silence of the cosmos. Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's leading paper, greeted the first artificial satellite with restrained delight and gave it only a standard two-column item, while Western coverage was overwhelming: the launch was called "space's Pearl Harbor." The political situation on Earth changed decisively soon after, even though three months later this traveling companion slipped out of orbit and burned up against the atmosphere.

In the 60 years since, artificial satellites have found extremely broad use in science, in the military and in daily life. They upended the way people communicate, opened and then deepened the Cold War, gave birth to the internet, and in the end changed how people understand themselves and look at the world.

They are used so widely that they have become a kind of invisible infrastructure. People born after the Cold War take their presence and their usefulness for granted, which takes nothing away from how important they are.

On October 10, 2017, Beijing time, in the last round of European qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Iceland beat Kosovo to top its group and qualify directly, becoming the 16th team in the world to reach the finals — and the least populous country ever to get there. Thanks to satellite television, hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watched that moment as it happened.

Then there is GPS, a network of radio signals relayed to Earth by satellite. It serves fire departments and ambulances, air traffic control, freight and logistics, farm produce delivery, banking and finance. Even the fitness app that traces your running route depends on it.

When natural disasters strike — the big hurricanes that hit the United States and the Caribbean islands, the floods in the Indian Ocean — the images and tracking data satellites collect also help the world predict extreme weather and respond to it.

Satellites have even become a business a private company can run. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, founded the space exploration company SpaceX in 2002; its latest plan is to start launching high-speed internet satellites on Falcon 9 rockets in 2019 to provide high-speed internet service worldwide, with the eventual goal of putting 4,425 satellites into space by 2024. About 1,459 artificial satellites are floating over our heads today, plus more than 2,000 that no longer work — which means SpaceX's satellite plan alone is bigger than every satellite humanity has launched so far, combined.

This July SpaceX raised a new round of $350 million, making it one of seven privately held tech companies in the world valued above $20 billion.

The First Satellite's Successful Launch Set Off the U.S.-Soviet Space Race of the Cold War

Almost every account of what Sputnik did to the international situation says, without exception, that it opened the U.S.-Soviet space race of the Cold War. In fact, before the launch, neither side had carefully prepared satellites as a pretext for firing at the other.

Sputnik grew out of a program that had nothing to do with it. The Soviet Union badly wanted a rocket that could deliver a hydrogen bomb to the United States, and when the military missile program stalled, the scientist Sergei Korolev asked the Kremlin for permission to launch a satellite instead — the American plan to put up a satellite in September 1957 had been made public back in 1955.

The Soviet government approved the plan in January 1956, but officials believed in their hearts that the satellite was worth little, and their minds stayed on the hydrogen bomb.

In under three months, working from earlier and better-tested research, Sergei Korolev rushed out a design for an extremely simple satellite and sent Sputnik into space without finding time to fit any scientific instruments to it. He knew that if he was a step slower, the Americans would be the ones to open the space age.

On the other side, Explorer I was never the satellite the United States meant to launch first, because its scientific value was limited. In 1955 the American scientific satellite program was put out to bid among the three armed services — only the military could launch rockets at the time — and the Navy's Vanguard program won, with a launch originally set for September 1957.

Sputnik's success shocked the United States and put it under enormous pressure, or more precisely, fear. Americans even believed the Soviets could now drop a nuclear weapon anywhere in the country. (They could not, yet.)

President Eisenhower then pressed the Navy to get a satellite up as fast as possible. Vanguard TV3 had already been postponed, and when it failed in December the pictures went out on live television, which inflamed the public further. The New York Times called it "a blow to American prestige"; Senator Lyndon Johnson called it a "humiliation."

In January 1958 the United States finally launched its own first artificial satellite, Explorer I.

In March, Vanguard 1 went up. It was the world's first scientific satellite, and it is still in orbit today.

But what drove the great powers' space programs then was not exploration. It was ideological competition and national pride. One thing about Sputnik's political meaning is clear: before it, nobody was thinking about a space race.

The U.S. Congress passed a space action plan in January 1958, and NASA was born that year on October 1.

Sputnik's launch reached into American domestic politics too. John F. Kennedy promised during his campaign to win back ground in space exploration and missile defense, which is considered one reason he narrowly beat the sitting vice president, Richard Nixon, to become president. Not long after Kennedy was elected, on April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode the Vostok 1 spacecraft once around the Earth in one hour and 48 minutes, the first spaceflight in human history.

That stiffened America's resolve to lead the race to the moon. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy announced his support for the Apollo program at a special joint session of the Senate and the House. The astronaut Frank Borman described Apollo as "just a battle in the Cold War." You could argue that without that first Soviet satellite, the American Apollo program would not have come together so fast, and the great powers would not have had such strong reason to go into space at all.

Three flights stand out in the decade of the Apollo program. In December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the moon for 20 hours and saw up close a moon that was "empty, vast and lonely." On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong took humanity's giant leap on the lunar surface. And though Apollo 13's mission failed, the story of its three astronauts' miraculous survival gave people a deep sense of how "dangerous and beautiful" the cosmos is.

The New York Times wrote of Apollo 13 that the harrowing flight had the opposite effect of what one might expect, stirring enormous public interest in space exploration.

This run of confrontations in space tipped the United States toward science and technology education. After the National Defense Education Act passed, the federal government put up billions of dollars so that students majoring in mathematics, engineering and science could borrow at low interest. By 1968 the National Science Foundation's budget had grown from $34 million a decade earlier to $500 million.

Across the ocean, the British Empire felt the same unease. The Conservative government opened eight new universities in this period, among them the University of East Anglia and the University of Sussex, hoping to close the technology gap with the Soviet Union.

More players joined the race. Dongfanghong-1 went up on April 24, 1970, making China the fifth country in the world — after the Soviet Union, the United States, France and Japan — able to develop and launch an artificial Earth satellite on its own.

More than 40% of the satellites now in orbit belong to the U.S. government and private companies, with China second at more than 10% and Russia slipping to third.

Communications Satellites Pushed Globalization Along and Changed How People See Themselves and the World

From the 1960s on, communications satellites gradually replaced microwave relay stations. Households with televisions pulled the rod antennas off their roofs and put up parabolic dishes the shape of a big wok.

Two years after it was founded, NASA finally launched Echo 1, the first artificial satellite built specifically for global communications. It was a balloon 30 meters across with an aluminum-coated skin that could only bounce electromagnetic signals back from the ground; it could not amplify them or aim them, and a meteorite strike destroyed it not long after.

America's first civilian communications satellite of real practical use was Telstar, which NASA launched for AT&T on July 10, 1962, at a cost of $1 million. It could carry multiple telephone circuits and television pictures between a ground station at Andover in eastern Maine and European stations at Goonhilly in Britain and Pleumeur-Bodou in Finistère, France.

Two days after Telstar went up, France and Britain beamed a television program to American viewers by communications satellite for the first time. The first program ran just over seven minutes and included a song by the French singer Yves Montand. It is worth noting that the theory behind communications satellites had been published in 1945, well before Sputnik reached space, by the British engineer Arthur C. Clarke.

Live satellite broadcasts made big, hard-fought sporting events far more immediate: the instant a result was settled, television viewers around the world knew it. The 18th Olympic Games were held in Tokyo, Japan, from October 10 to 24, 1964, the first time an Asian country hosted the Olympics. That year the Syncom communications satellite launched by the United States carried the Games worldwide for the first time.

It also opened a market in Olympic broadcast rights that had not existed before. To raise money and stage the Games well, the International Olympic Committee let organizing committees charge the media outlets that carried them. At the 1972 Munich Olympics the IOC pinned down the commercial value of television rights, took charge of how the money was split, and took back from host cities the right to sell those rights itself, laying the groundwork for the bidding that sold the rights to later Games.

FIFA has benefited too. By 2014 it was already taking in $2.428 billion in World Cup television revenue, and this year it asked for the moon: $120 million in broadcast fees from Russia, the 2018 host, nearly four times the $32 million it got from Brazil, the host before.

Satellite television changed how people looked at the world. By sharing information it widened their view enormously, and people grew more and more aware that a "global village" existed. In the comparatively romantic 1960s and 1970s, being a "world citizen" was for a while an important way of thinking that led young people toward the future: they stopped seeing questions from where they stood and started taking the whole world into account. It produced the hippie movement and its embrace of many cultures, and the "Gaia" theory in ecology (though where that theory has gone since is open to argument). And, of course, it produced the internet.

The modern internet began as a sketch drawn during the U.S.-Soviet space race of the Cold War. We went through this in detail in a recent article, "How People Afraid of Nuclear War Drove the Birth of the Internet During the Cold War." Put simply: had the military not needed to prepare for war, the internet very likely would not have been born, or at least not in the hands of the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an organization set up in 1958 to help the United States catch up with the Soviet Union in the space race.

Today more than 3 billion people around the world use the internet.

Distance Learning, Telemedicine, Disaster Forecasting — What Satellites Make Possible Matters Even More in Poor Regions

Satellites have also made it far easier for many remote developing countries to reach knowledge and information. In 2004 India launched the world's first education satellite, EDUSAT, from an aviation base on the Bay of Bengal. Its 12 transponders blanket the whole country, and directional antennas let it send educational programming in local dialects to particular regions — necessary in a country of many ethnic groups, with at least 30 different languages and a thousand-odd dialects.

EDUSAT lets students at more than 11,000 village schools across India attend class remotely, with the teacher appearing on a television screen. These virtual classrooms have greatly lightened the financial burden on the Indian government of building schools and hiring teachers.

The same move works for African countries whose technology education lags, and Africa, beset by disease and disaster, has developed another satellite service: telemedicine. Rural health care there rests mostly on frontline health workers with no formal medical training, each responsible on average for more than 10,000 patients, and hospitals are usually far away — one visit to a doctor can mean days of travel. Doctors abroad, diagnosing remotely, can get patients treated in time.

In 1999, with American help, South Africa launched its first satellite, and 11 years later it set up its own space agency. As the largest space organization in southern Africa, the South African National Space Agency regularly issues disaster-monitoring forecasts for the region, which matter a great deal to aviation. South Africa also uses satellites to watch human settlements grow and housing get rebuilt, and to observe urbanization, which yields useful information for city planning.

In the more unstable parts of Africa, satellites serve one more particular purpose: tracking the movements of extremist groups. Nigeria once used the SatX and Sat2 satellites to recover 273 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram.

From the Political Space Race to the Commercial Space Economy

After the moon, Mars is humanity's next target. Colonizing Mars is exactly the ambitious plan the American commercial space company SpaceX wants to pull off, and using satellites to give users everywhere high-speed internet is another of founder Elon Musk's big goals. That plan, with an estimated price tag of $5 billion to $10 billion, will fly on the "used rockets" SpaceX has recovered successfully, to hold the total cost down as far as possible.

Those "used rockets" are SpaceX's famous Falcon series. Only last month, on the 28th, SpaceX was marking the ninth anniversary of the Falcon 1 launch — a day that is in fact fairly painful for Elon Musk, because before it he had botched three rocket launches in a row. SpaceX's money was nearly gone and the company was on the edge of bankruptcy. He bet everything he had left on the fourth launch, and it worked.

SpaceX today looks like a NASA contractor. To make sure the United States could fly astronauts again by 2017, NASA signed a development contract with SpaceX for a large crewed spacecraft. Boeing is a supplier on the same NASA program, but SpaceX, a startup, draws far more attention: it was founded 86 years after Boeing, which dates to 1916. Boeing has more than 150,000 employees. SpaceX has 4,000.

NASA likes this small company a great deal. At the end of last year SpaceX won its 10th order from NASA, this one to launch a satellite in 2021 to survey how water is distributed across the Earth's surface — the first survey of its kind in human history.

As a driving force behind private satellites, SpaceX has already brought the cost of a satellite launch under $60 million (China's Long March 3B rocket costs more than that to fly). Building a low-orbit satellite communications network is no longer SpaceX's vision alone; OneWeb, Telesat and others are competing for it.

OneWeb's founder, Greg Wyler, plans to build a global high-speed communications network out of 648 near-Earth satellites; the latest word is that the plan will add nearly 2,000 more. Founded in 2012, OneWeb has already raised more than $1.7 billion from large companies including SoftBank, Virgin and Airbus.

Space has gone from a symbol of national strength to new ground for commercial adventure.

Commercial space travel is one of the main directions, and a crowd of companies is racing to open the space tourism market in 2018 — a year that happens to be the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8's first flight around the moon.

SpaceX intends to send people into space in the second quarter of 2018 for a trip around the moon. Virgin Galactic, founded by the billionaire Richard Branson, also plans to begin commercial space travel in 2018, at $250,000 a ride. And another private space company, Blue Origin, recently announced it was pushing the launch of its first rocket carrying space tourists from 2018 to April 2019. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos.

In these 60 years the way people communicate has changed beyond recognition, and in the end it may no longer be hard for an ordinary person to go to space — and it all began with the string of beeps Sputnik sent out after it reached space in 1957.

Cover image from Unsplash