Sputnik Declassified (review)

To thwart anticipated Western doubt and disinformation, Sputnik’s engineers rigged the gleaming 184-pound aluminum ball with a simple radio transmitter that emitted a distinct high-pitched tweeting. On October 4, 1957, radio amateurs across the globe monitored the relentless chirping pulse that traced Sputnik’s maiden orbit 560 miles above the earth (at apogee), thus independently verifying Soviet supremacy. The next day, headlines such as “Soviet Satellite Hurts Nation’s Prestige” fomented panic. On television, Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, proclaimed Sputnik- -short for Sputnik Zemlyi, “traveling companion of the world”--a greater “and more important” defeat for the U.S. than Pearl Harbor.

President Dwight Eisenhower took the heat, if not the fall. Renowned newspaper man Merriman Smith challenged Ike at a snippy October 9 White House press conference: “Russia has launched an earth satellite. They also claim to have had a successful firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile [August 21, 1957], none of which this country has done. I ask you, sir, what are we going to do about it?” Footage of a somber Eisenhower responding to Smith’s harangue appears in Sputnik Declassified, a NOVA documentary written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer, whose credits include Failure is Not an Option (2003), the story of NASA’s flight controllers.

Sputnik Declassified documents America’s stumbling entry into the space race, when military-sighted policy decisions smothered scientific adventure. Playing a new angle, the documentary uses recently declassified “top secret” reports to lend its story an air of controversy and mystery. Sputnik Declassified leans primarily upon the Killian Report (February 14, 1955)--officially titled Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack--drafted for Eisenhower by a scientific advisory panel. Dramatizing phrases such as, “Satellites can have several important uses related to intelligence,” Sputnik Declassified concludes that the stoic Eisenhower took secrets “to the grave.” These belied his “popular image” as an unimaginative duffer who dismissed space exploration as mere theatrics and fell asleep at the switch while the Russians rocketed ahead. Cleared of smoke, the exonerating secrets amount to this: Eisenhower’s disdain for the space race did not extend to spy satellites, a race he won, but couldn’t tout, i.e. the classified CORONA reconnaissance system.

Even so, Ike still muffed a sure score. The conjecture about the “real” Eisenhower--a contingency of popularizing science and history?--saps some of Sputnik Declassified’s strength. However, a weak denouement doesn’t diminish the script’s impressive breadth, a masterful encapsulation that mingles Cold War history with the physics of rocketry. Highlights include file footage of Sergei Korolev, designer of the R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik, and a lucid illustration of Isaac Newton’s concept of orbital velocity. Sputnik Declassified traces the origins of the space race to the V-2 rocket Wernher von Braun designed to terrorize British civilians. Scrubbed of his Nazi past, von Braun emerged as the head of the U.S. Army’s missile program in Huntsville, Alabama. On September 20, 1956, von Braun’s team appeared poised to launch the world’s first satellite, setting an altitude record with the Jupiter C, a V-2 progeny, which carried a payload of sand 682 miles into space.

“If we had just one more rocket on top, we could have placed a satellite in orbit around the Earth.” said von Braun, who had dreamt of satellites and spaceships since youth. But the brass, fearing a detraction from military work, had given von Braun strict orders--enforced through site audits--not to work on satellites. The biographer Stephen Ambrose gives a sense of the president’s mindset in Eisenhower: Soldier and President. To Nelson Rockefeller’s suggestion (January, 1958) that sending a satellite to the moon and back would be “the most notable accomplishment of our time,” Eisenhower said he’d rather have a good intermediate range ballistic missile than be able to hit the moon because the U.S. didn’t have any enemies on the moon. In...