Dear Sputnik: How a simple sphere changed my life
Sixty-one years after the satellite's launch, a writer reflects on how it influenced him growing up in the Soviet Union.
Dear Sputnik,
You are the main reason I wished so often to be born a couple of decades earlier than I actually was. Just imagine the sorrow of a space fan who barely missed the epochal event in 1957 that humanity had dreamed of for centuries: the launch of Earth’s first artificial satellite, and the dawn of a new Space Age.
In the late 1970s, I was coming of age in Moscow in the Soviet Union. As I looked up at the skies through the telescope of the Moscow planetarium, I remember arriving at two vague ideas about space exploration: that you had started without me, and that you were already a fossil, a legend of a bygone era.
Images of you were
