Sixty years ago today, the United States used a modified German V-2 rocket to send the country's first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit around the Earth. This momentous achievement was just the first step in a long journey that has already allowed us to explore every planet in the solar system, as well as interstellar space itself.
“The launch of Explorer 1 marked the beginning of U.S. spaceflight, as well as the scientific exploration of space, which led to a series of bold missions that have opened humanity’s eyes to new wonders of the solar system,” said Michael Watkins, current director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a
press release. “It was a watershed moment for the nation that also defined who we are at JPL.”
The motivation
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union secretly fired Sputnik 1 into space, making it the world’s first artificial satellite. Circling the globe at nearly 18,000 miles per hour (29,000 kilometers per hour), the beach-ball-sized, 190-pound orb took about 90 minutes to orbit the Earth. On the ground, however, citizens of the United States were temporarily frozen.
“Now we have a Soviet object flying overhead. And it was clear that they could build a missile now that would reach the United States,” said Don Gurnett, a physics professor at the University of Iowa who has been intimately involved with space probes ranging from Voyager to Cassini. “And so there was this huge inferiority complex that had developed in the United States — we were behind.”