Tim Radford on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik-1

Space exploration is 50 years old this year. Tim Radford talks to scientists inspired by the launch of the first man-made object into orbit

Fifty years ago this October a Soviet engineer launched the rocket that put 184lbs of metal and electronics high into orbit. In doing so, he also launched a new phase of the Cold War. But the signals sent by Sputnik-1 as it encircled the globe also contained a message for academics everywhere.

Who said the sky was the limit? Suddenly, science was going places, and going there fast, at speeds greater than 8 kilometres per second: to the strange radiation belts high above the atmosphere, to the moon, to the planets, to the heart of the galaxy, and of course, onto television screens with Tomorrow's World, The Sky at Night and the Open University.

Sputnik-1 was the beginning of a thousand technological marvels, such as real-time Earth observation, accurate weather forecasting, pinpoint navigational accuracy and instant global communication. Because they could get beyond the radiation-absorbing, light-distorting fog of the planet's atmosphere, astronomers could begin to see not just clearly but at all wavelengths - like Superman, suddenly they had x-ray eyes. Because satellite design required big electronics in small packages, computer science took off. Because computer scientists had new ways of storing and transmitting information, geologists could become planetary scientists as well, and dream up billion dollar questions that ended in billion-kilometre journeys.

And people who had never thought of going into science suddenly saw a whole new world of possibilities.

Professor David Southwood, once a physicist at Imperial College, was at school in 1957: "I didn't really start studying space for some time, until an industry existed. I went from being a linguist to being a mathematician, to being a physicist to being whatever I am now."

He is now director of science for the European Space Agency: a job that took him, via an instrument on the US-European orbiter Cassini, to Saturn, and might take him, once again by proxy, to Mars in 2013 with a European mission to land on the red planet and scoop a shovelful of soil and sift it for signs of life. So Sputnik-1 changed his life, he says. "I would have gone somewhere else, for sure. Whether I would even have become a scientist, I don't know. Space certainly inspired me to stay in science."

John Zarnecki is a professor at the Open University. He and colleagues devised a sensitive instrument that - for just one-hundredth of a second in January 2005 before it was crushed by the rest of the European lander Huygens - probed the surface of Saturn's mysterious moon Titan and identified it as a kind of icy gravel. His career in science too grew out of the thrill of the post-Sputnik years. He had been a boy in Highgate in north London when the first man out of this world, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, visited Highgate Cemetery to salute at the grave of Karl Marx.

"We were given the day off school to see Yuri Gagarin. For some reason all my mates went off to play cricket or football or play with their Gameboys or whatever you did in 1961. I went to Highgate cemetery. This guy came along and he was much smaller than I had thought, he had a military uniform and a great big hat that seemed to dwarf him, and he stood there. He saluted, and I suddenly realised that this bloke had been in space for 93 minutes and it was just totally mind-boggling. For me that was the defining moment. I thought: I'd like to do that, even though I didn't know what that was."

He went on to do physics at Cambridge, and then he heard about University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. "You could go and launch rockets in Australia. I couldn't believe it. They offered me a PhD."

Mullard scientists now have satellite instruments staring at the sun, Venus, Mars and Saturn. "For the first time, we are peering underneath the haze of Titan, using infrared and ultraviolet to see through the organic smog," says Andrew Coates, of the Mullard lab. "We are going to Mars. We are going to be taking the next European pictures of the Martian surface. We are dreaming of new missions to places that haven't been explored yet, like Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has an icy surface and a liquid water ocean underneath. And then there is also another possible mission to look at Titan again, and another Saturn moon - Enceladus - which we have recently found has liquid water underneath its surface. Apart from Earth, Europa and Enceladus are the only places where we know there is liquid water."

There are nearly 10,000 pieces of sophisticated hardware, faltering instruments and outdated junk orbiting the planet, every one of them inspired by Sputnik-1, and all of them launched since 1957, just one year after Britain's then-astronomer-royal Sir Richard Wooley intemperately declared that any talk of space travel was "utter bilge". You can follow some of the story at the newly-redeveloped space gallery at London's Science Museum, which now takes the story of space research on from the Apollo moon landings to the most recent attempts at Mars and Saturn.

Space, as Douglas Adams famously observed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is big: "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." Missions such as Voyager, launched almost 30 years ago, are still sending back data from the edge of the solar system. Rosetta, launched three years ago, will not even begin returning serious data to European scientists until it meets and goes into orbit around a comet in 2014 to keep it company on its journey around the sun.

"There are scientists who have retired or died already because it takes a long time to get to these places," says Dr Coates. That could be another unexpected consequence of Sputnik-1. Academics who had been firmly told that they no longer had jobs for life got the chance to begin projects that could continue long after their deaths, on journeys to the furthest planets, to distant comets, and beyond those to the nearest stars. It's a subject with a short history, but a bright future, in every sense.

Contributor

Tim Radford

The GuardianTramp

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