Space-age secrets revealed 50 years later

Rushed to launch pad
The Soviet Union already had a full-fledged scientific satellite in development, but it would take too long to complete, Korolyov knew. So he ordered his team to quickly sketch a primitive orbiter. It was called PS-1, for "Prosteishiy Sputnik" — the Simplest Satellite.

Grechko, who calculated the trajectory for the first satellite's launch, said he and other young engineers tried to persuade Korolyov to pack Sputnik with some scientific instruments. Korolyov refused, saying there was no time.

"If Korolyov had listened to us and started putting more equipment on board, the Americans could have opened the space era," Grechko said.

The satellite, weighing just 184 pounds (84 kilograms), was built in less than three months. Soviet designers built a pressurized sphere of polished aluminum alloy with two radio transmitters and four antennas. An earlier satellite project envisaged a cone shape, but Korolyov preferred the sphere.

"Earth is a sphere, and its first satellite also must have a spherical shape," Chertok, a longtime deputy of Korolyov, recalled him saying.

FREE VIDEO Sputnik remembered In a 1977 retrospective, NBC News' David Brinkley and Roy Neal look back at Sputnik. MSNBC

Sputnik's surface was polished to perfection to better deflect the sun's rays and avoid overheating.

The launch was first scheduled for Oct. 6. But Korolyov suspected that the U.S. might be planning a launch a day earlier. The KGB was asked to check, and reported turning up nothing.

Korolyov was taking no chances. He immediately canceled some last-minute tests and moved up the launch by two days, to Oct. 4, 1957.

"Better than anyone else Korolyov understood how important it was to open the space era," Grechko said. "Earth had just one moon for a billion years and suddenly it would have another, artificial moon!"

Soon after blastoff from the arid steppes of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, the satellite sent out what would be the world's most famous beep. But the engineers on the ground didn't immediately grasp its importance.

"At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done," Chertok recalled. "We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok. Only four or five days later did we realize that it was a turning point in the history of civilization."

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