Customer Reviews

Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Science Matters)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a longtime space buff, I looked forward to reading this book about an event that happened before I was born. I found two factual errors that unfortunately left me questioning the authenticity of other facts in the book.

On page 41, the book reads "In 1968, as Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon..." and on page 236 it states "When the space shuttle was first launched in 1982..." These events, of course, happened in 1969 and 1981, and rank among the most important space events ever (along with Sputnik's launch, certainly). How these two dates could be incorrect makes me just a little skeptical that other things I read in the book might just be a little off as well. What if a book on early US history listed Jefferson as the 4th President?

I really wanted to like this book, and altough it tended to be a little dry at times, I found many interesting stories and details, but two blatant factual inaccuracies that made it past however many people they made it past before the book's printing left me a little wary of the rest of the content. I don't want to malign the entirety of the author's work for what might be no more than typos, but I just could not get past those two.

On 4 October 1957, the world woke up in the space age. The first artificial satellite (people were originally calling it an artificial moon) had been successfully launched by the Soviet Union. It weighed less than 200 pounds and was only as big as a basketball, its batteries died after three weeks whereupon it went silent, and after three months aloft it disintegrated upon reentry into the atmosphere. This tiny and ephemeral ball made huge differences in science and the world political climate, and in Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Walker & Co.), Paul Dickson has reviewed them all. He has also given a history of what led up to successful launches of satellites in both the Soviet Union and the US, so that his book is a useful review not just of the first satellite but of twentieth century space exploration in general.

The Russians already had a relatively long history of thinking about space before Sputnik went up. The visionary Tsiolovsky was a self-taught scholar who in 1898 created the first formula to specify what sort of power would be needed to send an object up so as not to fall down again. He described that this could be accomplished by a "reaction machine," which we know as a rocket. He never got to use models, but his first sketch of a spaceship had fuel tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, just as the shuttle uses. He described the use of booster rockets to attain escape velocity. Of course, Dickson tells the fascinating story of our own neglected rocket man, Robert Goddard, who made real rockets and gained over 200 patents, but mostly got only posthumous credit for his accomplishments. And then there was Sergei Korolev, a Red Army Colonel, who, as "chief designer" of the Soviet rocket program, was the man responsible for Sputnik, and for Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight. Little was known about him at the time, because the Soviets wanted their space efforts to be seen as a communal, rather than an individual, effort, and they thought that if he were known, he would be a target for CIA assassination. He had also been imprisoned in the Gulag when Stalin came to believe that rockets would be used to overthrow the government. Dickson reviews the worry with which Americans viewed Sputnik, and how Eisenhower (who was criticized for not worrying enough) actually was pleased that it opened up space for spy satellites.

American science and technology were in trouble in some ways. Dickson details the rivalry between the services to claim space as a theater of operations, and the rivalry between military and civilian agencies. There were problems of underfunding of basic research. Science within education needed higher priorities, and for many schools, the Sputnik era was the first time that Darwin could be mentioned. Sputnik resulted in a meaningful American space program, and Dickson's readable and informative re-evaluation of the repercussions of the little aluminum ball shows that it affects us still.

Paul Dickson argues in his book "Sputnik: The shock of the Century" that this little 184 pound satellite launched by the Soviets in October 1957 changed the world. He says that it changed the way Americans thought, and that it paved the way for our own space program.

I agree that it was a shocking event and quite a blow to the pride of the United States - to see the Soviets launch an artificial Earth orbiting satellite before we could do it? Unheard of! I don't think that it changed the world quite as much as Dickson claims, however.

At the close of his book, Dickson says that the two most important marvels of the 20th century were Sputnik and the Internet. Certainly leaves a lot of room for discussion, doesn't it?

I believe that Dickson has done us quite a service by writing this book - it is a great history both of the space race up to, and including, an introduction to both the Apollo and Gemini missions of the 1960's, as well as the social history that acompanied this massive PR coup by the Soviets.

I especially enjoyed the way that Dickson explained how much America focused on education (science, math, and the like) after the Soviets beat us into space. I also tremendously enjoyed the role of Werner Von Braun in our own efforts to launch a satellite. However, I think that this book easily could have been much, much larger in order to adequately cover the primary topic - Sputnik and all of the ramifications of that fateful day in October.

To date in my life there have been just a few events that caused me to sit back and rethink everything. The earliest of those events was the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The latest was September 11, 2001. In between, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, and Watergate had large impacts.

Reviewing those events now, the Sputnik launch clearly had the largest impact. I was already space crazy, and had been following the plans for launching satellites as part of the International Geophysical Year with great interest. I had a photograph of the Vanguard rocket in my bedroom. I also knew that the Soviet Union planned a satellite, but assumed that it would come later than Vanguard. Then, pow! Sputnik is sailing around the globe, visible at sunrise and sunset. I also knew that even if we launched Vanguard the next day, it would be puny compared to Sputnik. Clearly, the Soviet Union was years ahead in space. How could that be?

Soon, the curriculum in my school was enriched with math and science and a lot of my friends decided to become engineers. Since I was good in both areas, there was a lot of pressure on me to do the same. Of the people with these talents, I was the only one who did not pursue a technical career or teaching science.

I was very impressed with this book because it captured the popular reaction to the event at the time, detailed the decisions that led up to the U.S. falling behind, and spells out what happened later (for good and bad). Although over 90 percent of what is in the book was known to me before, I found it helpful to see the pieces all put together in one place. As a result, I feel a sense of closure over Sputnik now for the first time in my life.

In directly, I also got a new appreciation for the character of American Society. While reading the book, I compared the reactions here to how the U.S. handled the Gulf War and the terrorist bombings this year with the many mistakes of the Vietnam era. Like all people, we make our share of mistakes, usually when we are feeling overconfident. But we don't like making mistakes, and we then do whatever it takes to do better the next time by not repeating the old errors. For us, once is enough.

For those who are old enough to have teenage or adult children, I would recommend that you share this book with them. I do not recall a better book for capturing the mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s in terms of what we were thinking about in the Cold War. This book can help create a link between generations. I'm sure that many young people do not know that many of today's technologies, such as packet switching for the Internet, came as byproducts of the Cold War competition. This book can also help create a connection from the present into the past through observations such as that one.

My only quibble with this book is that the subtitle seems overstated. For people who were over age 10 in 1941, I suspect that Pearl Harbor was a bigger shock in the United States. For the whole world, Sputnik may have been the shock of the century, but the book doesn't argue or make that case. But publishers usually pick titles and subtitles, so I'm not going to count this against the author.

One continuing lesson of this book is that we still have probably not done the right job of defining our American and worldwide objectives for space. Although we got to the moon in 1969, we couldn't easily get back there again now. Our vision of space needs to be a continuous, contiguous one that expands our knowledge and capabilities efficiently and effectively.

Where is America overconfident today? What should we be doing better?

Where are you overconfident today? What mistakes may that overconfidence cause you to make?

I read Paul Dicksons new book about Sputnik a few days after the events at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The book is very topical, because it portrays a period from the 1950s that has many distressing similarities to our current political climate. Dickson describes a time when America felt that it was under siege -- by Communists rather than terrorists. One even finds phraseology from the period that we are hearing today, with people during the Cold War talking about cells of Communists just as people now are talking about cells of terrorists. One of the major lessons from Dicksons book is the danger of developing national policy based on knee-jerk public reaction. Dickson describes how after Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower was under intense pressure to respond quickly. Yet Eisenhower was willing to take the heat in the short term in order to achieve some of his broader long term policy goals vis-à-vis the Russians. I wonder whether Eisenhower would have been able to stay the course in the face of widespread immediate criticism had he been forced to deal with the barrage of public opinion polls and instant analysis that we have now.
Dicksons book is a great read. I was born in 1952, so I do not have any memories of the initial Sputnik hysteria in the 1950s. Dickson makes the characters and events from that period come alive. The book is carefully researched, but information about the details and sources are put in an appendix so that readers of the main text will not become bogged down. While the book was written and published before the tragedies of this past September 11, it provided a very useful context to help me better understand some of the responses we are now witnessing.

If you are buying books on the internet and reading reviews posted in cyberspace, this is a book you must read, because both the information technologies that enable you to read this review, and the culture that values such forms of expression, can be traced to events that followed the launch of Sputnik in October 1957. As Paul Dickson describes, Sputnik was "the shock of the century." It was an event which put processes in motion that have shaped our society for half a century.
America was a different place in 1957, preoccupied with returning to the cultural norms that had existed before the disruption of World War II and the rise of communism. Government was small and largely uninvolved in education, research, or social change. Public schools emphasized the "three Rs" and local values. Colleges and universities had swelled in size to meet the needs of WWII veterans, but remained largely focused on intellectual pursuits. Industry had turned its attention from building weapons, to meeting the seemingly insatiable demand for consumer products. The military was shrinking, confident that America had a commanding lead in technology, which could neutralize any threat from the larger military forces of communist nations.
All of that changed the night of October 22, 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik. It would be months before the United States could do the same.
Americans no longer felt secure. In response to the ascendancy of communist technologies, Congress rapidly put in place new programs that would ultimately transform American society. The Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA) was created to lead massive new initiatives in advanced technology, computing, and applied research. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established to coordinate America's push into space. Hundreds of billions of dollars would be invested to build great research centers that would bring together military, industrial, and academic interests to assure America's technological supremacy. Also, Congress would also pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to ensure that public schools produced an new generation of scientists and engineers.
The results were dramatic. In a little more than a decade, America would launch hundreds of satellites and win the race to the moon. America's universities, defense establishments, and commercial enterprises would invent microchips, computer networks, and new methods in chemistry, physics, and biology that would provide the foundation for an age of technology. Perhaps even more important, traditional education would be reformed to emphasize independent inquiry, invention, exploration, and expression and sow the seeds for the Age of Aquarius. Fifty years later, we live in a world of ubiquitous personal computers, the world wide web, MySpace, and YouTube, all of which can be traced directly to the ideas and initiatives that were a response to the "shock of the century."
How did all of this happen? That's what Paul Dickson describes what happened in a compelling, carefully researched, and readable of the events that transpired around the launch of Sputnik. Anyone reading this review or buying this book on line will readily understand how the events he describes continue to shape our world as we approach the 50th anniversary of Sputnik in October 2007.

I was 11 years old when Sputnik beeped across the sky and I stood with my father in our back yard, night after night, staring at the stars. It was a time full of wonder. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, took me right back to that little girl staring at the sky, to the awe and excitement I'd felt but had forgotten. But even more than that Paul Dickson's book has given me the facts: The information I didn't understand as a child and didn't bother to learn as an adult. This isn't a book just for space 'nuts' ...although mind you, every Space-nik (!) will be thrilled... it's a book for every man woman and child who wants to know just how we came to be where we are not only in space, but on earth. Sputnik put us on a wonderful path that changed the world forever. Buy this book for your mom... then read it yourself.

What a wonderful book. Dickson's account of "the shock of the century," the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik, is written in an easily read, but truly revelatory style. Dickson has done his homework. His research into classified files and information only accessible since the demise of the USSR allows him to tell a story and a back-story we could not have previously known. There are famous characters here. I assure you, whether you are left-leaning, or neo-con, you will welcome his perspective on Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Kennedy. You may not have known of the Soviet scientists Tsiolkovsky and Korolev, but you will be glad that Dickson has told their stories and the tale of the dog, the cosmutt, Laika, too.

And, of course, the former Nazi Wernher von Braun's. Von Braun pops up throughout the book: a handsome suave genius who will build a rocket that can orbit a satellite if only you will give him marks, rubles, or dollars; slave labor, interned labor, or union labor.

As you might have gathered, Dickson's book is not about the number of rivets in Sputnik, nor the calculus equations that slide-rule men wrote to send the bright satellite with its meaningless meaningful constant beep around our globe. It's about a moment when America pivoted. When Americans decided that what was, was not good enough. We needed a plan, and success.

The director of the American Institute of Physics at that time said that the American way of life was "doomed to rapid extinction" unless the nation's youth could be taught the importance of science. Such were the stakes.

Dickson ends his book with this, which gives I think a sense of this intelligent and nuanced work:

"The United States could have put the earth's first satellite in orbit [but its] third stage was a dummy. American honor would have been assuaged at the beginning of the space age, but it might have led . . to a much different resolution of the Cold War. An old friend asked [von Braun], `Should there be any regrets?' . . . `Perhaps it depends on whether it is better to be the first to put a machine into orbit or the first to put a man on the moon!'"

Greenman, Garrett Park, MD

If you want an understanding of how the United States endede up as the 800-pound gorilla for the rest of the world, you should begin with Paul Dickson's meticulously researched and cleanly written account of how we were jump started into supremacy in the space race more than forty years ago. Just ignore the ... and get this book; it should be a civics textbook that is required reading. Dickson's tale should be a PBS documentary, but don't wait till then.
Lula Srodes

Washington DC

Greetings:

I would like to congratulate Paul Dickson on an outstanding presentation of one of the most complex and exciting events in world history. His research is meticulous but the following corrections should be consideration in subsequent printings:

1. Page 106 describes the R-7: "...the ground shook as no fewer than thirty-two rocket boosters thundered with 200,000 pounds of thrust.

The R-7 actually has 4 engines in each of five "packets" for a total of 20 primary engines thrusting at launch. The other 12 engines were relatively low thrust "verniers" responsible for pitch, roll, and final velocity control. Each of the primary thrust chambers provided 56,000 pounds of thrust for a total of 1,120,000 pounds.

2. Page 106 states: "The three stage rocket..."

The R-7 configuration for the first three Sputniks was essentially a 1 ½ stage rocket. All engines ignited at liftoff. When the four outer packets depleted their fuel, they were released leaving the central core to continue thrusting to orbital speed. There were no upper stages at this point.

3. Page 107 states: "Ninety-six minutes and seventeen seconds later, Sputnik passed over its launchpad with its transmitter sending out a beeping noise that blared from Baikonur's loudspeakers."

Because of the earth's rotation, the launch site moves east several hundred miles (about 1000 miles per hour at the equator diminishing proportionally at the higher latitudes.) so subsequent orbital passes are offset. Sputnik could not have over flown its launch site at the end of its first orbit.

4. Page 181 states: "On March 23... the 30.66 pound Explorer III went aloft...".

The correct date is March 26.

5. Page 199 states: "That night the four-ton Air Force Atlas ICBM was fired into orbit from Cape Canaveral, making it by far the largest object yet to circle the globe.

This is a common misconception that was promoted by the US at the time. As noted in my Item 2, the entire core stage of the R-7 actually entered orbit for the first three Sputniks. The soviets never identified the weight of this unit because they did not want to give any indication of the R-7 configuration. This stage was about 90 feet in length and weighed in excess of 12,000 pounds.

6. Page 247 states: "... those working with the launch vehicle were ordered to make sure that the third stage was a dummy".

Jupiter-C was designed as a four stage rocket. Thus it was the fourth stage that was inert. The first three stages were fired for the nose cone tests.