Oct 4 1997
From The Space Library
The international scientific community observed the 40th anniversary of Sputnik's successful launch. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union had sent into orbit Sputnik 1, a small sphere-shaped satellite, setting off a space race that continued throughout the Cold War. Although the United States had initially responded to the Soviet Union's achievement with fear and apprehension, NASA commemorated the event 40 years later with a celebratory symposium. The United States had launched NASA itself less than one year after the USSR's Sputnik success, partly because of the American public's distress over the Soviets beating the United States into space. The son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei N. Khrushchev, a prominent professor of International Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, spoke at NASA's Sputnik symposium. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had unveiled to the world's scientists many of the developmental plans of the Sputnik program. However, the end of communism had also precipitated enormous budget shortfalls for the Russian Space Agency. Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev took the opportunity of Sputnik's widely celebrated anniversary to complain publicly that Russia owed more than US$400 million in rent for Baikonur Cosmodrome-the site of Sputnik's launch and of ongoing Russian space activity. When the Soviet confederation broke up, Russia had agreed to pay US$ 100 million annually for the right to continue using the launch facilities in Kazakhstan.
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