Sputnik blazed a trail across the October sky

By Chris Baldwin

MOSCOW (Reuters) - For three men standing at different junctures in the history of space exploration, a beeping sphere speeding across the sky in 1957 seemed at once silly, inspiring and a harbinger of things to come.

Boris Chertok, a key developer of the Sputnik satellite, which celebrates its 50-year launch anniversary on Oct 4, said he still marvels at the significance of putting a shiny alloy ball into orbit.

"A day or two after that 'beep-beep' called out around the world, we were as excited as could be expected, but neither we nor the Soviet media understood the significance of our achievement," said Chertok.

Chertok and a team of engineers worked with Sergei Korolyev, the father of the Soviet space industry, in constructing the R-7 rocket as a delivery vehicle for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and saw Sputnik as an unimportant, secondary project.

"The majority of Korolyev's assistants, among whom I must include myself, out of thick-headedness and a lack of foresight, thought this was all a child's plaything, this Sputnik," Chertok told reporters at the Korolyev Museum in Moscow last week.

Korolyev drove his team of engineers to great lengths to put the Soviet Union into space first, ahead of the United States.

To do that, Korolyev reasoned, the Soviets would need to fly across the heavens and make themselves heard, above and beyond developing a missile that could deliver atomic bombs into America's heartland.

"Americans hawks were screaming that those who held the Cosmos in turn held the Earth," said Chertok, now 95 but still putting in two days a week as a consultant at Russian rocket manufacturer Energiya.

"Under the guise of creating a military presence in space, our government gave us the go-ahead for developing Sputnik."

OCTOBER SKY

Homer Hickam was in the tenth grade when Sputnik flew over his hometown of Coalwood, West Virginia, inspiring him to dream of a life outside the coalmining future that lay in store for so many of his friends, neighbors and family members.

"I was awestruck by this bright, shiny star that came across the sky with such energy, and I decided at that moment that I wanted to be part of the movement that was the whole world going in to space," Hickam said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Hickam went on to become an aerospace engineer at NASA, training astronauts and supervising crews for Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions.

He later wrote a memoir called 'Rocket Boys', about his life as a young man launching homemade rockets with a group of school friends that was then made into the 1999 film 'October Sky'.

Hickam said his encounter with Sputnik came full circle when he traveled to Russia as a NASA engineer to negotiate the International Space Station (ISS).