An idea before a machine
The first satellite was the result of ideas and engineering developed over several decades, by people in several countries. The launch of 1957 marks the end of this early period, not its start. This article is about the people and the work behind it. The launch itself is described in our article on the Sputnik launch.
The theorists
Isaac Newton described the principle of orbiting in the seventeenth century with a thought experiment: a cannonball fired from a high mountain would fall farther before hitting the ground if it were fired faster, and at a high enough speed it would never land. That idea contains the basis of a satellite, but a launch method was missing.
In the early twentieth century, several thinkers began to describe how rockets could provide one.
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian schoolteacher, published work from 1903 onward on the mathematics of rocket flight. His rocket equation, which relates a rocket’s final speed to its exhaust speed and the proportion of its mass that is fuel, remains basic to the field. He also wrote about multistage rockets and space travel.
- Robert Goddard, an American physicist, studied rockets from the 1910s and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in March 1926. He worked mostly with a small team, and his work was met with skepticism from some of the press and public, though it was later recognized.
- Hermann Oberth, a Romanian-born German, wrote a book on rockets and space travel in 1923 that influenced a generation of enthusiasts in Germany.
- Hermann Potočnik (Noordung), who wrote in 1929 about space stations, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1945 article described satellite relays, extended the concepts to uses; Clarke’s proposal is discussed in our article on communications satellites.
Amateur rocket societies, notably in Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, brought these ideas to practical experiments.
The rocket builders
Having a theory of rockets is different from having a rocket large enough to reach orbit. The key advance came in wartime Germany, where a team led by Wernher von Braun developed the V-2 ballistic missile. Its first successful launch occurred in 1942, and it was used operationally from 1944. A V-2 launched vertically could reach altitudes beyond 100 kilometers, so it is often cited as the first human-made object to reach space, though it was a missile and did not orbit. The program used forced labor, and thousands of prisoners died; this is an important part of its history that should not be left out.
After the war, the Allies took V-2 hardware and engineers. The United States brought von Braun and many colleagues to the country, where they worked for the Army, first at Fort Bliss in Texas and then at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. The Soviet Union took other German specialists, but it relied heavily on its own designers.
Sergei Korolev and the Soviet team
The chief architect of the Soviet program was Sergei Korolev. Trained as an aircraft engineer, he was arrested in 1938 during the political purges and sent to a labor camp before being moved to a design bureau for imprisoned engineers. He was released in the 1940s and rose to lead the effort to build long-range missiles. His identity was kept secret by the government for years, and he was known publicly only as the “Chief Designer”. His name appeared in public only after his death in 1966.
Several others were essential. Mikhail Tikhonravov, a rocket engineer who had studied satellites for years, helped develop proposals for a satellite and is often credited alongside Korolev for the plan that led to Sputnik. Valentin Glushko led the design of engines for the R-7 rocket, and many other engineers and technicians built the vehicle and the satellite. Korolev and Glushko later became rivals, which affected the program’s later direction.
The R-7 was designed as an intercontinental missile, and it was this military rocket that placed the first satellite in orbit. This pattern, of a missile adapted to space launch, applies to both superpowers.
The American teams
On the American side, the first satellite attempts were organized by different groups.
- The Navy’s Vanguard project, run through the Naval Research Laboratory, was intended as a civilian scientific effort and had a new rocket designed for it. Its early failures were a setback.
- The Army’s team at Redstone Arsenal, led by von Braun, adapted the Jupiter-C rocket and, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under William Pickering, built the Explorer 1 satellite.
- James Van Allen, a physicist at the University of Iowa, designed the cosmic ray instrument on Explorer 1 whose data led to the discovery of the radiation belts later named after him.
Von Braun later led the NASA center that developed the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program. Vanguard 1, launched in March 1958 after the earlier failures, is the oldest artificial object still in orbit.
Sharing the credit
The satellite was not invented by one person. Newton gave the principle, Tsiolkovsky and others provided the mathematics of rockets, Goddard demonstrated liquid-fueled flight, German engineers built the first large missiles, and Korolev’s team combined these developments into a vehicle that reached orbit. There are conflicting claims about contributions, in part because the work was classified for years, and some of what was written about the early program was shaped by official storytelling. The wider story of what these pioneers started is told in our article on space age beginnings.
The common theme is that these people worked in uncertain conditions, and sometimes under political pressure. Their work shows how a technology that looked like fantasy in 1900 became real in 1957.