New Moon

Abstract

If they had known then what they know now, would they have done the job? They would surely have been daunted, even given the imperatives of the Cold War. But they did not know how difficult space exploration would be. The “cold warriors” had their incentives: intercontinental ballistic missiles and reconnaissance satellites. And the enthusiasts, who sometimes were also cold warriors, had their long-held aim: to go beyond Earth’s atmosphere. By Thursday evening, October 3, 1957, their destination was less than a day away.

“In Leningrad, Korolev could not then by any means know that, after many very hard times, sometimes cruelly unjust to him, a beautiful spring would come when... would be reflected a world of black sky and blue Earth, a world never before seen by Man.”

—Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev:The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer

“And all of a sudden you wake up one morning, and here’s this doggone Russian thing flying overhead... Oh, no, there was a great deal of disturbance...”

—William Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in 1957. From a transcript of an oral history in the archives of the California Institute of Technology.