The Space Age: Stuart Clark (1957)
In October 1957 people around the world listened to a sound that was unlike any other they had ever heard before. It was a simple beep-beep-beep emitted by the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 and to many its steady, monotonous beat was more beautiful than the music of Mozart. For the first time in human history, people had broken the bounds of their home planet. The Space Age had begun.
This is the history that the writer and broadcaster Stuart Clark guides us back to in this episode of Travels Through Time. Clark is an astronomer and has long been fascinated by the night sky. In recent years he has studied how our human relationship with it has shifted and evolved. Some have approached the night sky as a puzzle to be solved, others as a source of solace or an example of the majesty of Creation.
Perhaps the artist Vincent Van Gogh captured this allure as well as anyone. He wrote to his brother Theo of having ‘a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars.’
In the mid-twentieth century our experience of the night sky was changed forever by the launch of the first unmanned rockets. The effort to put a rocket into space was founded on technology that was developed during the Second World War and it was catalysed by the Cold War rivalry of the 1950s between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The crucial moment came in 1957, as Clark explains. It was then that the brilliant and enigmatic engineer Sergei Korolev managed to launch his pioneering rocket, Sputnik 1, instigating what was swiftly called ‘The Space Age.’ Korolev’s success was seen as a realisation of the dream of his forerunner, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote two decades before: ‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.’
From Sputnik’s launch site at Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, Clark takes us half way around the world to West Virginia. The launch of Sputnik caused consternation in the US (the New York Herald Tribune called it ‘a grave defeat for America.’) and it generated a conflicted response in the mind of the future NASA engineer Homer Hickam, who watched Sputnik streaking across the night sky from his back garden and was filled with a sense of sublime awe.
From there we continue to the office of the American journalist Alexander Marshack. Just as the imagination of the world was set alight by the Soviets’ achievement, Marshack instead took the event as a signal to look back into deep time. ‘How,’ he wondered, ‘had our distant ancestors thought about the night sky? What was it to them?’
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Click here to order Stuart Clark’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: 4 October, 1957, At the launch of the first satellite Sputnik 1 with Sergei Korolev
Scene Two: October 1957, Beside future NASA engineer Homer Hickam in West Virginia as he looked up into the night sky, saw Sputnik 1 and felt awe-struck inspiration
Scene Three: Late 1957, In the office of American journalist Alexander Marshack in the aftermath of the launch, as he tried to put things together and make sense of why humans wanted to ’touch’ the night sky
Memento: Korolev’s radio receiver, the object that received the first transmission from space
People
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Dr Stuart Clark
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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See where 1957 fits on our Timeline
Prize draw
We have two hardback copies of Beneath the Night and two prints of Jordan Lloyd’s colourised image from the NASA archives to give away. If your name comes out of the (digital) hat you’ll win a book and print. To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is sign up to our fortnightly newsletter. Deadline Tuesday 20 October.
Jordan Lloyd’s colourised image of the Space Age
Also, as mentioned in the episode, if you want to see Jordan’s set of colourised images on the March to Washington, then just click here.
More about the scenes discussed in this episode
Scene One
With Sergei Korolev for the launch of the first satellite Sputnik 1. Watching it rise into the air, and then waiting in the bunker for it to circle the Earth; if they picked up the bleep-bleep as it rose above the opposite horizon it meant that they had reached orbit and made history. When the signal came, Korolev phoned Krushchev to tell him the news, and the world changed.
Scene Two
With future NASA engineer Homer Hickam in West Virginia as he looked up into the night sky, saw Sputnik and felt awe-struck inspiration. In his memoir Rocket Boys, he wrote: “I stared at it with no less attention than if it had been God Himself in a golden chariot riding overhead. It soared with what seemed to me inexorable and dangerous purpose, as if there were no power in the universe that could stop it.’ To me this is a great indication of the sublime awe humans feel when contemplating the night sky and our dreams of travelling in it.
Scene Three
In the office of American journalist Alexander Marshack in the aftermath of the launch, as he tried to put things together and make sense of why humans wanted to ’touch’ the night sky. What was it it that drove this fascination. His path of investigation, led him out of journalism and into archeology as he unearthed the evidence of human fascination with the night sky dating back many tens of thousands of years, establishing the field of archeoastronomy in the process, which has today merged with anthropology to form cultural astronomy to investigate our enduring fascination with the night sky.
Featured images from the dawn of the Space Age from the NASA archives
Listen on YouTube
As mentioned in the episode, Peter’s photograph of the night sky (with Milky Way), New Zealand
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Click here to order Beneath the Night by Stuart Clark from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
The mantle of night that we have stared at for millennia. (John Sandoe’s)