[42] Another memorable achievement of the Soviet IGY programme was the launching of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957. In view of the many scholarly studies of the early sputniks which have appeared in recent years, only their IGY-related aspects will be treated here.
[43] In the early 1950s the Soviet Union and the United States each had their `space lobby', and each grouping brought together scientists keen to probe the upper atmosphere and near-space environment with rocket engineers from military R&D establishments. But on balance it was the latter who were most effective in the Soviet Union and the former in the United States. It was an important difference.
[44] The idea of including artificial satellites in the IGY, if possible, was successfully proposed by the American delegation, at the instigation of Lloyd Berkner, to the CSAGI meeting at Rome in 1954. The Soviet delegation, as we have seen, could not attend the workshop at which this was endorsed. The final plenary, though formally presented with the workshop resolutions, was no place for a discussion. In any case Belousov had his instructions and satellites were not covered by them.
[45] The US IGY committee then spent several months discussing the technical feasibility of such a project before approaching the Eisenhower Administration for its definitive consent, since rockets developed by military agencies would be needed, in the summer of 1955. The official announcement of a US satellite project for the IGY was made by the White House Press Secretary, Jim Hagerty, on 29 July 1955.
[46] In May 1954 two leading Soviet rocket engineers, Sergei Korolyov and Mikhail Tikhonravov, supported by Korolyov's immediate boss Mstislav Keldysh, the director of Scientific Research Institute 1, broached the idea of launching small scientific satellites as an increasingly feasible offshoot from missile programmes [Gorin, 2000, pp. 35-36]. At about the same time the Chkalov Central Aeroclub in Moscow formed an Astronautics Section which brought together many enthusiasts. In September 1954 the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences created the Konstantin Tsiolkovskii Gold Medal, in honour of the father of Russian rocketry, to reward outstanding work in the new field of space exploration. It also set up an Inter-departmental Commission for Interplanetary Communications (ICIC) headed by Academician Leonid Sedov with Tikhonravov as his deputy. The purpose of the ICIC, as announced in April 1955, was "to organize work concerning building an automatic laboratory for scientific research in space''.62
[47] A few days after the White House announcement Sedov attended a congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen. At a press conference he confirmed that the Soviet Union was thinking about launching a satellite and could be expected to do so "in the comparatively near future''.63 From that point members of the US IGY panels for rockets and satellites tried everything they could to find out whether the Soviet satellite would be an IGY project and when the first attempt might be made. But for more than a year the Soviet IGY committee and the ICIC, two Academy-led bodies with equal status, continued along parallel paths with little sign of converging.
[48] Korolyov kept up his increasingly effective lobbying of government departments, including the Academy, on behalf of scientific satellites. But what he was offering at the end of August 1955 was a chance to beat the Americans by launching just before, not during, the IGY. In his capacity as a corresponding-member of the Academy, Keldysh convened a series of elite seminars to brainstorm proposals for the scientific payload. They began by reviewing reports compiled for the ICIC [Skuridin, 1986, pp. 454-456; Golovanov, 1994, pp. 523-524].
[49] With Korolyov in charge of the launch vehicle and Keldysh taking the lead on the on-board experiments, there was little scope for a working group on rockets and satellites under the IGY committee.64 One of the many scientists consulted by Korolyov in 1955 was S. N. Vernov, a cosmic ray physicist who had worked with the rocket programme since 1947 and who joined the IGY committee in April. But the committee showed no further sign of wanting to play a part in the satellite programme until it co-opted Anatolii Blagonravov at the end of 1956. An ICIC member and supporter of Korolyov, Blagonravov was chairman of the Academy's commission on upper atmosphere research, yet another interested body with no IGY connections.65 At the same time Yevgenii Fyodorov, a founding member of the IGY committee and former director of the meteorological service during World War Two, was named as the IGY committee member responsible for rockets and satellites. He was finally dubbed the convener of an IGY working group on rockets and satellites in dealings with CSAGI's British coordinator Archibald Day, three months after the launch of Sputnik 1. But there is no trace of any activity by his putative working group as such.66
[50] This chronology shows why the Soviet delegation could only send two silent observers to the CSAGI Assembly's working group on rockets and satellites at Brussels on 10 September 1955, at a point when even Keldysh's non-IGY group had barely got going.67 Berkner, by now the CSAGI reporter for rockets and satellites, next arranged a special symposium on satellite programmes for the CSAGI Assembly at Barcelona in September 1956, partly with the aim of drawing out the Russians. His targets seem to have been tempted, only to change their minds, or to have them changed by another part of the Soviet state. In August 1956, with only weeks to go, the Soviet committee included the names of two upper-atmosphere physicists, Boris Mirtov and Sergei Poloskov, in its request for visas. Mirtov had been a member of Korolyov's team since the 1940s; Poloskov joined the IGY committee at the end of 1956 alongside Blagonravov. But neither went to Barcelona.68 Instead Poloskov read a paper on Soviet rocket research by himself and the absent Mirtov, which caused a considerable sensation, to an international conference of the French Association for Aeronautical Research at Paris in December [Blagonravov, 1957]. There are several possible explanations for the switch, but the upshot was that at the Barcelona symposium on 11 September Bardin could only announce the existence of a Soviet IGY satellite project, without giving any details.69 And his small, linguistically handicapped delegation was in no position even to comment, let alone disagree, when the Americans proposed that all IGY satellites should use the same radio frequency as they had already chosen for their own tracking signals.
[51] Korolyov did not launch a satellite before the opening of the IGY on 1 July 1957. But another significant date was approaching, 17 September, the centenary of the birth of Tsiolkovskii. In June Belousov brought the long-awaited outline of the Soviet IGY rockets and satellites programme to a meeting of the CSAGI committee in Brussels. Western readers found it frustratingly vague. On his copy Richard Porter, the chairman of the US IGY satellites panel, tersely listed twelve points which "They have not said:- and we have'', including launch sites, tracking systems and instrumentation.70 At Brussels Belousov also renewed a Soviet proposal, first made a few months earlier, that a special IGY conference on rockets and satellites should be held. The Americans had earlier refused until they got at least something in writing from the Russians; now they agreed to host the event.71
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[53] Negotiations continued. In January 1958 Day visited Moscow to resolve outstanding issues about data exchange for the Guide to World Data Centers which he was preparing. The Russians, now two sputniks up on the Americans, presented their own revisions, but then discussed them positively enough. They followed up with a further version, based on those meetings, saying that it was what "we shall stick to''.74 Despite accepting what he called "the two programme principle'', or in other words agreement to differ, Day had to propose that further discussion and amendments were still needed, even as he struggled to put the Guide `to bed' in April.75 At the Moscow CSAGI Assembly in July a working group tried yet again, but its chairman Homer Newell was obliged to report that complete agreement continued to elude them. Published only in 1959, the final text reflected that fact.76
[54] One of the issues that was never resolved was whether the original, unprocessed recordings of signals from another country's satellite should be sent to its IGY committee and if so when. Owing to geographical and political circumstances the Soviet committee was more in need of data collected by foreign stations, especially from the southern hemisphere, than the US committee. In Van Allen's carefully stated opinion, however, his group's priority in discovering the radiation belts was not a product of this advantage.77
[55] Uneasily though the Soviet satellite programme sometimes wore its IGY credentials, it reflected the authentic spirit of the IGY in one respect, the value which it placed on amateur observers. Unlike their Western colleagues the radio amateurs of the Soviet Union operated almost entirely at their clubs, which were provided by the Voluntary Society for Cooperation with the Army, Air Force and Navy, better known from its Russian initials as DOSAAF.78 Details of the planned satellite signals and the apparatus and methods needed to observe and report them were published openly, but unnoticed by Western Soviet-watchers, in June, July and August 1957 in the magazine Radio and the newspaper Soviet Patriot. Amateurs at about 25 locations were trained to listen for and report the signals, samples of which were broadcast in August and September 1957, probably not on the actual frequencies. On the night of the launch amateurs at Khabarovsk and Magadan provided some of the earliest evidence that Sputnik 1 had successfully entered orbit [Bulkeley, 1999; Siddiqi, 2000, pp. 64-65].
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