In the shadow of Sputnik.

Forty years ago a Soviet earth orbiter sent Americans reaching for the stars. Bruce Dorminey explains the enormous influence of the first artificial satellite on space exploration

It was an era of gyroscopes, Geiger counters and grandiose ideas about space travel, a time when big science and the onward march of technology was thought to be the salve for an increasingly decolonised and polarised world.

Yet on 4 October 1957 most Americans had second thoughts as the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, Earth's first artificial satellite. It was 96 days and about 1,400 global revolutions later before this 84-kilogram polished aluminium display of Soviet technology decayed into the atmosphere.

"Sputnik kicked off a media riot in the US," says Walter McDougall, historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. "The opening of the space age was such a sexy topic and the idea that the Russians were up there first sounded so scary that the media virtually instructed Americans to panic."

But the first of three Sputniks launched on a series of R-7 ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) at Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Ukraine comprised only a test payload carrying a primitive radio beacon and a thermometer.

There were still demands that President Eisenhower call a special session of Congress to address the crisis. Instead, he held a press conference five days later at which he remarked: "As far as the satellite itself is concerned that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota."

Others argued that even if the…