The Sputnik Shock

News of the successful launch triggered shock across the United States and the wider West, an event that went down in history as the "Sputnik crisis." For the first time, it was evident that the Soviet Union had technologically outpaced the United States in rocketry.

Sputnik orbited the Earth once every approximately 96 minutes. At dusk and dawn, a bright point could be observed in the sky with the naked eye — in fact, this was usually the rocket's spent booster stage traveling along a similar orbit, which people mistakenly took for the satellite itself.

The Sputnik shock led directly to the founding of the American space agency NASA in 1958 and to massive U.S. investment in scientific and technical education.