Just a 1-page article to summarize today. It is a reprint of a short piece by Hugh Odishaw, titled "Soviet satellite carrier rocket," from Science magazine, vol. 126, no. 3287, 27 Dec. 1957, p. 1334.
It reports that on 8 Dec. 1957 a cable was sent by A. N. Nesmeyanov, chief scientific secretary of the Soviet Union, to Detlev Bronk, the president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The letter stated that some unburnt parts of the rocket that carried Sputnik 1 into space might have been scattered on a line between Alaska and the west coast of the United States (Alaska was not yet a state.) Nesmeyanov asked that any recovered pieces be returned to the USSR Academy of Sciences. Bronk responded that no such finds had been made.
According to NASA, the Sputnik 1 rocket body, a Semyorka R-7 ICBM, was the second stage, or "core booster", that carried the Sputnik satellite into orbit. The rocket body itself (about 55' high by 10' across) also reached orbit and was visible from the ground as a magnitude 1 object. In fact, this was actually the "Sputnik" people saw from the ground over the next few months. The much smaller (2' diameter) Sputnik 1 satellite was barely visible at magnitude 6, one hundred times fainter than the rocket.
Below are two depictions of the Sputnik 1 rocket from my collections.
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| Schematic of the Sputnik 1 rocket (source is a booklet in my collection: Soviet Sputniks, 1959, p. 28) |
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| The Sputnik rocket and satellite depicted on North Korean stamp from my collection (Scott #134, issued 26 March 1958) |
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