SPUTNIK 50, 2007 AT THE ADLER PLANETARIUM, SERGEI KRUSHCHEV

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SPUTNIK 50, 2007 AT THE ADLER PLANETARIUM, SERGEI KRUSHCHEV

Sputnik raised the bar 50 years ago

By Chicago Tribune

Fifty years after the launch of Sputnik sparked the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited an Adler Planetarium exhibit on the dash to the moon Thursday and addressed the satellite’s role in space exploration.
Sergei N. Khrushchev, a senior fellow at Brown University and self-proclaimed “dinosaur of the space age,” recalled that Soviet officials did not publicize Sputnik’s launch, hoping to avoid bad press in case the mission failed.
Still, the satellite’s successful launch on Oct. 4, 1957, was an important moment for Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, his son said.
“I was with my father in Kiev and late in the night they called my father and told him that the launch had been successful and that Sputnik had made an orbit over us,” Sergei Khrushchev said. “My father was smiling. … He was very proud, and all of us were very proud.”
The launch caught the rest of the world — and especially the United States — by surprise, prompting the formation of NASA and leading in part to President John F. Kennedy’s desire to put an American on the moon by the end of the 1960s. That mission culminated with Neil Armstrong’s lunar walk July 20, 1969.
Sputnik “was the beginning of our age-old dream to travel into space, and it really opened the door for all of the future space exploration that has occurred,” Adler President Paul H. Knappenberger said.
“It got me interested in astronomy,” said Knappenberger, who was in high school when Sputnik was launched. “At that time in the United States, there was a lot of emphasis on reform for math and science education, and a lot of dollars went into reforming and improving math and science. It led to a lot of careers.”
Exhibits such as the planetarium’s “Shoot for the Moon,” which chronicles the history of the U.S. space program and details NASA’s plans to again send astronauts to the moon, allow future generations to understand developments in fields such as space exploration, Khrushchev said.
“It’s very important to preserve our history, because we never know how rapidly everything is becoming obsolete,” he said. “It’s important to the young people because for them, 50 years is so far in history that they can’t even think of what happened.”
Political and scientific developments since the launch of Sputnik — a 184-pound aluminum sphere, roughly the size of a beach ball, that orbited Earth about every 96 minutes while broadcasting high-pitched beeps through two radio transmitters — demonstrate how dramatic change can be, said Les Kordylewski, who searched the skies above Krakow, Poland, for any sign of the satellite as a child and spoke with Khrushchev on Thursday at the planetarium.
“Now, we have the son of Nikita Khrushchev here, and there is no conflict,” Kordylewski said. “There is no Soviet Union. There is no Cold War. In 50 years, the world has changed so much.”
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Originally Published: October 5, 2007 at 1:00 AM CDT