"We were winning the race for space but we got side-lined by politics," said former Russian space satellite, Vladimir "Sputnik-1"Goloavejacik. "We really had the fast-lane on that project -- we just seemed to get our wires crossed in the end."
Technically speaking global war and mass destruction were just around the proverbial corner on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik-I -- The world's first artificial satellite weighing-in at about 183 pounds -- roughly the same size of a huge soccer ball or a small satellite.
"I was so far up there," remembered Sputnik-I, "that, I seriously doubted I'd ever seen the earth again, but then again, what goes up most certainly, ..."
Sputnik-1 said he took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on his first elliptical path but that his launch more importantly introduced new scientific, political, military, and technological developments to the world.
Even though Sputnik 1's launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age. "You could see everything from up there," said Goloavejacik. "The view was outstanding and we were cutting edge, but we blew it. The ride was like I was hitched to the tail of a Comet, and I forgot my camera."
Retired and re-equipped and outfitted with new and improved computer chips and homing and roaming devices, the former satellite today lives in Minsk with his wife of thirty years, Robotica. Another space-race veteran, his dog Laika (Piloted Sputnik-2), and his "extended family" of portable TV's, transistor radios, radar scopes, and intercontinental ballistic missiles and batteries.
"In 98 minutes today I can be eating caviar in Moscow or chicken in Kiev," Goloavejacik said. "It's awesome how the world has changed since that flight."
For a few moments in 1957 the world stood perfectly still near their radios and the few TV's that existed and waited to see if they could hear Sputnik-1's radio-signal from space.
Finally there it was, a steady Beep-Beep-Beep that would haunt the U.S. Space team until they launched their own Vanguard-driven satellite -- nicknamed "Kaputnik" because it exploded twice before it was put into orbit -- nearly two years later. "
"They never knew what hit them, we were way ahead of everyone on that one," Sputnik-1 said. "The world thought we were still making Scythes and hammers back at the barn-road-factory.
"No, we were doing it high tech with slide rules and pencil protectors and calculators. I'm pretty sure our guys even invented all those too."
Sputnik-1 says it was clear sailing to the moon and beyond in that early fight, "Sure, we could have the moon and every last speck of that green cheese at this point," he said.
"C'mon we were the first one. We could have the Direct-TV Franchises, control the telephone industries of the world. That wall would still be standing in Berlin if they'd hadn't changed my trajectory. We would have been on Mars forty years before anyone."
"By now we would have colonized, that was the plan," said Sputnik-1. "Why do you think we named it the "Red Planet?"
