Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [113]
The men responsible for the satellite would begin to grasp the importance of their feat only when they boarded their special flight from Tyura-Tam to Moscow on the night following the launch. Most of the exhausted engineers had passed out shortly after takeoff, Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh slumbering in their elegant and neatly pressed suits, while Korolev, shifting uncomfortably in his trademark black leather jacket and turtleneck sweater, stared wearily at the dim cabin lights. As soon as their big Iliushin-4 prop jet had leveled off over the orange Kazakh desert, the pilot, Tolya Yesenin, came rushing out of the cockpit. “The whole world is abuzz,” he gushed, grasping the Chief Designer’s hand and pumping it furiously. Korolev sat up, startled. He had been so preoccupied during the past twenty-four hours that he had had little contact with anyone outside Tyura-Tam other than Khrushchev, and had no idea that word of the launch had spread so far, so wide, so fast. Abuzz? The whole world? Really? Korolev couldn’t contain himself. He jumped out of his seat and made straight for the flight deck to use the plane’s radio. When he returned some minutes later, he was unusually ebullient and emotional.
“Comrades,” he cried, rousing his sleepy colleagues. “You can’t imagine what’s happening. The whole world is talking about our little satellite. Apparently we have caused quite a stir.”
• • •
Much like Korolev, it was not until the night of October 5, and only once he had returned to Moscow from his maneuverings in Kiev, that Nikita Khrushchev began to realize what a tremendous victory he had just scored against the United States.
Throughout the day, Soviet embassies and KGB stations around the globe had been busy compiling foreign press clippings and political reactions to Sputnik. By the next morning, the reports had been translated, cabled to Moscow, sorted, and slotted into the thick folders Khrushchev received with breakfast every day at his government mansion in Lenin Hills. The files—green for foreign press clippings, red for decoded diplomatic traffic, blue for agency reports—must have made savory reading. “The achievement is immense,” declared Britain’s Manchester Guardian. “It demands a psychological adjustment on our part towards Soviet society, Soviet military capabilities, and perhaps—most of all—to the relationship of the world to what is beyond. The Russians can now build ballistic missiles capable of striking any chosen target anywhere in the world. Clearly they have established a great lead in missile technology.” “Myth has become reality,” crowed France’s Le Figaro, commenting gleefully on the bitter “disillusion and bitter reflections of the Americans who have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain.”
Khrushchev leafed through the stack of diplomatic dispatches with increasing relish. “A turning point in civilization,” the New York Times declared, “that could only be achieved by a country with first rate conditions in a vast area of science and engineering.” An Austrian paper opined that “in contrast with the first steps in the atomic age which began with 100,000 deaths, mankind can rejoice without destruction on the conquest of cosmos by the human spirit.” China’s main daily hailed Sputnik as a “validation of the superiority of Marxist-Leninist technology.” Radio Cairo declared that “the planetary era rings the death knell of colonialism; the American policy of encirclement of the Soviet Union has pitifully failed.”
Khrushchev was astonished by the reaction. It was as if, overnight, his nation had been vaulted to a preeminent position atop the global hierarchy. The Soviet Union, in the eyes of the world, had suddenly become a genuine superpower,