Re: Why did Sputnik threaten us and what did it do for us?

Dear Rachel, I'm sorry if this is getting to you late. I'm now in Canada and have had a hard time getting onto the WEB. On October 4, 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satelite into orbit. It stayed there for 61 days. While Sputnik was only about the size of a basketball, it weighed almost two hundred pounds. Both the Soviet and American space programs were direct decendents of the German rocket programs of World War II. Many of the scientists involved in each of the programs had come from Germany. This close link to the use of rockets for destructive purposes and the ongoing race to develope nuclear weapons by the two cold war powers was where the threat came from. Any nation that had overcome the technical difficulties of successfully putting a rocket and its payload into orbit would be only a step away from being able to put a nuclear bomb into space ready to use anytime and anywhere it wanted to. Being in space these weapons would be almost impossable to detect until instants before they detonated. To overcome this apparent Soviet superiority the space race accelerated in earnest resulting in America's eventual putting of a man on the Moon.