When the astronauts aboard the International Space Station pass above Kazakhstan, they can trace the path of the Syr Darya River to find the location from which they launched: the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where Sputnik–the world’s first satellite–also started its journey in 1957. This image was taken on 10 April 2016.
THE DIGITAL WORLD
Baikonur, Kazakhstan
45° 57′ 54″ N
63° 18′ 18″ E
It was visible, high up in the sky, after the Sun had set: a tiny moon moving faster than any other celestial body. Across the world, people took out their binoculars and set up their telescopes on roofs and in parks to observe the technological marvel of the age–using an amateur radio, it was also possible to hear the beep-beep-beep of the radio transmitters it carried. ‘Until two days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth. Suddenly it has become as much a part of twentieth-century life as the whir of your vacuum cleaner,’ said a reporter’s voice from the television set. On these autumn evenings in 1957, Sputnik–the world’s first artificial satellite–ushered in the space age as humankind looked on, astonished.
Sputnik was launched from the Soviet Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and orbited the earth in just 96 minutes and 12 seconds at a speed of 29,000 kilometres an hour. It was only 58 centimetres in diameter and at its highest point travelled 940 kilometres above the ground, but was still visible due to its polished surface designed to reflect the Sun’s rays. Sputnik’s engineers wanted the world to be able to follow the tiny metal ball’s progress–a victorious feat of propaganda in a world characterised by the rivalry between two superpowers. During its second day, the satellite passed over Berlin thirteen times, New York seven times and Washington six times–where the Americans were forced to bitterly admit that their arch-rival had reached space before them.
On Monday morning, after Sputnik had dominated the news since Friday evening, physicists William H. Guier and George C. Weiffenbach were eating lunch in the cafeteria of the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Baltimore, USA. They thought it was strange that nobody had studied the radio signals emitted by the satellite, and in the laboratory found a receiver and a small cable they used as an antenna. Late in the afternoon they heard Sputnik’s signals–beep-beep-beep–and started to record and analyse them, with no particular intention other than to save the data for posterity.
After a while, Guier and Weiffenbach discovered something interesting–the signals they heard when Sputnik first appeared on the horizon changed as the satellite came closer, only to change again as it passed over them and journeyed onwards–similar to the way the sound of a bell changes as you travel past it on a train at night. Using the changes in sound, the scientists were able to predict Sputnik’s trajectory and ascertain the satellite’s position at any given time.
One day, Guier and Weiffenbach were asked to come into their boss’s office and close the door behind them. He wondered whether it was possible to turn the finding on its head: using a satellite, was it possible to determine one’s position on Earth?
GPS | Today, we are often a part of our maps in the form of a tiny, moving dot–whether we’ve asked our car to find the fastest route to the local amusement park or are looking for a bakery in an unfamiliar city, we can use our GPS, tablet or mobile to view where we are and understand the direction in which we are moving. Geography is digitised–above us, satellites constantly send out signals indicating their positions; our receiver obtains information from four of these to work out where we are. One satellite provides us with the latitude, another with the longitude and a third the altitude–while the fourth satellite performs the calculations that enable the GPS to provide us with an accurate position.
The maps we use are also often based on images taken by satellites. We use satellites to map the weather, air quality, ice conditions, desertification, urbanisation and deforestation. One of the benefits of using satellites is that they orbit the Earth in fixed trajectories and therefore take photographs of the same areas over and over again, making it easy to observe changes even in deserted and isolated areas. A satellite can photograph the entire Earth in just sixteen days. ‘Man must rise above the Earth–to the top of the atmosphere and beyond–for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives,’ said the Greek philosopher Socrates, and at the time of writing around 1,100 satellites are currently orbiting above us. They survey the Earth in such detail–from 800 kilometres above the Earth, they are capable of photographing two dogs playing in a garden in Houston, Texas–that we are now able to update our maps faster than ever before in history.
The first person to imagine a man-made satellite orbiting the Earth was British scientist Isaac Newton. In his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), published in 1687, he described an experiment in which a cannon shoots a ball from the top of a high mountain. If the ball travels at a low velocity, it will fall to Earth, but if it travels at a high velocity, it will continue out into space. And if the velocity of the cannonball is just right, the Earth’s gravity will pull it into orbit.
In 1865, French author Jules Verne wrote a book based on Newton’s theory, From the Earth to the Moon, in which people travel around the Moon in a projectile shot from a cannon. In 1903, Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky enjoyed calculating how long Verne’s cannon would have to be, and the pressures the people in the projectile would be forced to withstand. Not unsurprisingly, Tsiolkovsky’s conclusion was that a cannon would be useless for sending people into space. Instead, he developed the principle of multistage rockets, in which the fuel tanks are disconnected as they are emptied. At the final stage, enough fuel remains to puff a small projectile into orbit. This was the principle that, fifty-four years later, gave us the first satellite as part of the space race between the two superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union.
V-2 | The race between the Americans and the Soviets started towards the end of the Second World War as a race to acquire German missile technology. During the last phase of the war, the Nazis introduced a new weapon that sent shockwaves through the Allied forces–the V-2 rockets.
The missiles were first launched from the occupied Netherlands on a September morning in 1944–people on the English side of the Channel saw three ribbons of smoke disappearing into the stratosphere. The missiles travelled eighty kilometres above the ground at supersonic speed–meaning that they crashed down in Paris and London just five minutes later, killing three people. The V-2 was the world’s first space rocket.
In the 1920s, the lead architect behind the V-2 programme, Wernher von Braun, was one of several amateur rocket enthusiasts based at a disused warehouse just outside Berlin–a location known locally as Raketenflugplatz. After a time, the group had made so much progress that the German Army began to take an interest in their work, and in 1932–the year before the Nazis came to power–the amateur rocket scientists became part of the army’s development programme, with von Braun in the role of technical director. In 1942, the group managed to launch a rocket to such an altitude that it left the atmosphere, before landing 200 kilometres away. ‘We have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time–mark this well–have used space as a bridge between two points on Earth,’ an excited German general wrote in his report.
The V-2 rockets never achieved great military significance, and more people died as a result of the forced labour used to create them–20,000 prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps–than from being hit. But both the Americans and the Soviets understood that this was the weapon of the future, and each side established specialist groups to gain access to German rocket engineers and drawings.
In February 1945, von Braun heard the Red Army’s artillery advancing towards the rocket laboratory. He and several hundred other employees gathered up everything they could carry and set out south-west towards the U.S. Army–believing, quite rightly, that with the knowledge they possessed they were simply too valuable to b
e imprisoned. In early May, the Americans made their way to the V-2 factory, which in accordance with Allied agreements would be deemed to be on Soviet territory from June onwards. Several tonnes of rocket parts were transported to Antwerp by rail convoy, and then on to the USA by sea. Von Braun and his colleagues also made the journey.
KOROLEV VS VON BRAUN | The Americans had won the first round–leaving little behind for the Soviets at the V-2 laboratory and factory–and so the Soviets decided to release Sergei Korolev, a brilliant rocket researcher who before the war had been imprisoned on the basis of false accusations and sent to Siberia. In August 1945, after a period of convalescence, Korolev was sent to Germany to discover how a V-2 rocket was constructed. ‘You must understand,’ a commissioner said to him, ‘the Americans won’t be resting. After the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they will continue their work with nuclear arms. And now they have only one enemy–us.’ The Soviets didn’t like the idea of the Americans enjoying sole possession of both nuclear weapons and missiles–and Korolev was therefore assigned to make up some of the ground lost to von Braun’s head start.
Due to the Cold War, the space race and arms race became two sides of the same coin, leaving both Korolev and von Braun frustrated at having to prioritise work on rockets intended for use in missile attacks rather than those that would put satellites into orbit. To varying degrees, both men were moon-sick dreamers who had far more desire to send people into space than to design ways to kill them. In an article, von Braun described how the Earth would look from above, echoing Socrates’ description from over 2,000 years earlier: ‘an enormous ball, most of it bulking pale black against the deeper black of space but with a wide crescent of day light where the sun strikes it. Within the crescent, the continents enjoying summer stand out as vast green terrain maps surrounded by the brilliant blue of the oceans. Patches of white cloud obscure some of the detail; white blobs are snow and ice on mountain ranges and polar areas’.
A satellite image map of San Francisco and the surrounding areas, photographed by Landsat 5 in 1985. The satellite phototographed both visible and infrared light, so the red areas are forests, woodlands, grassy areas and marshes, while the dull regions represent dry vegetation, mountains or earth in the uplands. The green areas indicate where salt is extracted from the seawater or other areas with high evaporation.
Both von Braun and Korolev attempted to convince their respective countries’ governments and militaries that satellites could be used to map the enemy–and in 1946 the Americans’ first V-2 rocket launches hinted at this. The space usually used to hold the explosives was instead used for the installation of scientific instruments and a camera, resulting in the first images of the Earth taken from space–a collage covering an area stretching from Mexico to Nebraska.
Korolev argued that satellites would act as the perfect spies for the Soviet military–capable of orbiting the Earth like a photographic eye, they would be able to observe even the tiniest details. He was told, however, that the Soviet Army was interested in obtaining weapons–not toys. Von Braun used the same arguments before the American military when he claimed that satellites would be able to lift any iron curtain, wherever it may fall.
In 1955, the American military published a report recommending the use of reconnaissance satellites–but first, they reasoned, it would be wise to send up a civil satellite and thereby establish the freedom to pass through space above any country. President Dwight Eisenhower announced that the USA planned to launch a satellite–‘a new moon’–in 1957.
Eisenhower’s speech sent a tremor through the Soviets. They had already been panicked three years earlier, when the Americans changed Pacific geography by blasting the Eniwetok Atoll off the map with the detonation of the world’s first hydrogen bomb–a bomb many times more powerful than the atomic bomb. After the Soviets detonated their hydrogen bomb in 1954 and decided to develop something even more terrible, Korolev was tasked with developing a rocket capable of carrying a warhead weighing five tonnes. Korolev immediately understood that such a rocket would easily have the power to put a satellite into orbit, and when he presented his proposed satellite to General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956, his idea was approved at the highest level–Khrushchev liked the idea of celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Russian revolution with the world’s first satellite.
COMPUTING | Performing the calculations necessary to put a satellite into orbit might be routine today, but doing it for the first ever man-made satellite was anything but, and required the Soviets’ most powerful computing technology. The Strela computer at Moscow University filled a 400-square-metre room, and was capable of performing up to 3,000 calculations per second. The machine would now be responsible for ensuring that a colossal rocket would nudge a tiny satellite out into space with just the right amount of force. Everything needed to be exact–and many test launches resulted in complete disaster.
The use of computers had increased during the Second World War as a means of both creating coded messages and cracking them. The computers were huge–there was a reason that the Allied forces’ best code-cracking machine was named ‘Colossus’–but developments in the field were rapid. In 1948, American electrical engineer Claude Shannon described how all information could be transferred digitally. ‘If the base 2 is used,’ he wrote, ‘the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits.’ With this, Shannon described the age of digital information, which would later give us both maps created using computers and online maps. Today, all computerised data is encoded using two digits, 0 and 1, and data capacity is measured in bits.
The transistor–a device that enabled electrical impulses to travel with unprecedented speed–was invented a year before Shannon presented his theory. In 1957, the year in which Sputnik was launched, American electrical engineer Jack Kilby had the idea of linking a number of transistors in an integrated circuit to form the microchip, thereby laying the foundations for all personal computers, smartphones and tablets.
But in the 1950s, computers were reserved for universities, laboratories, government agencies, large companies and the military. Strela was the first computer used by the Soviets in data programming, and Korolev and his team watched Sputnik’s launch with pounding hearts, anxious to see whether the machine’s calculations would prove correct. Late in the evening on Friday 4 October, white-gloved technicians placed the diminutive Sputnik atop a gigantic launch vehicle, and an hour and a half before midnight the ground shook as the engines lifted the rocket from a sea of flames up into the night sky. On the ground, observers nervously watched what appeared to be the perfect launch–until it suddenly seemed as if the rocket was returning to Earth. ‘It’s falling, it’s falling!’ several people exclaimed, before they realised that due to the satellite the rocket had been programmed to follow a different course to that of the test rockets. The engines shut down and sent Sputnik into orbit at 230 kilometres above the ground. Korolev smoked frantically while he and his team waited for the satellite to complete its first full orbit. When they finally received its signal–beep-beep-beep–Korolev asked everyone to listen: ‘This is music no one has heard before.’
TRANSIT | On the following Monday, Guier and Weiffenbach sat in their laboratory in Baltimore listening to Sputnik’s signals, and two weeks after the launch, when Sputnik’s batteries were depleted and the radio signals silenced, started to analyse the information using a computer. The results confirmed that it was possible to determine a satellite’s location by listening to the signals it emitted.
Head of the laboratory, Frank McClure, asked Guier and Weiffenbach whether they could turn this finding on its head, as he was assisting the marines with a project to equip submarines with atomic missiles. The idea was that the enemy would never know just how close they were to a nuclear attack, unaware as they were of the submarines’ locations–but the problem was that the submarines themselves were also often unsure of exactly where they were. This was vital information if the
missiles were to hit the desired targets–and ideally, the submarines would like to be able to determine their location without having to resurface to check the stars. McClure asked Guier and Weiffenbach how accurately they could calculate a position using satellites–they estimated that it should be possible with a margin of error of around 160 metres.
The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) was thereby established, and work began on the Transit navigation programme–the forerunner of today’s GPS. But first, the Americans had to prove that they too were capable of launching a satellite.
On the evening of Sputnik’s launch, Wernher von Braun had arranged a party for the new Secretary of Defense. A tense silence settled over the gathering when someone came in with news of the Soviet triumph–von Braun, rather ungraciously, is said to have muttered: ‘I could have done this a year ago.’ After Eisenhower announced the USA’s intention to launch a satellite, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force competed for the contract. Von Braun worked for the army, but despite the fact that he had the best solution some thought it problematic to allow the first American satellite to be created by Germans–particularly Germans with a Nazi background–and the contract was awarded to the navy. It was somewhat paradoxical that the American authorities had originally taken control of von Braun’s experiments to prevent him launching a satellite for anyone else.
Sputnik made the entire world look to the skies, and Khrushchev claimed the historic event was proof of communism’s superiority to capitalism. Time magazine called it a ‘red triumph’, and many feared that the Soviets were now capable of using atomic missiles against the USA. The Americans felt under pressure–which only increased when, two months later, Sputnik 2 was launched with Laika the dog on board–the first living being ever to enter space.
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