Competing for the Skies

When Burke K. Zimmerman ’58 was studying iron meteorites to determine the date of origin of the solar system as a research assistant at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), he said he never thought others would be using stopwatches to compute the orbit of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite sent into orbit the fall of his senior year.

On Oct. 4, 1957, as Zimmerman and his classmates were just getting back in the rhythm of their final year at the College, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, which would orbit the Earth for the next three months.

“It was like, ‘Wow, we finally got something up here,’” Zimmerman said. “We meaning the human race.”

Although Zimmerman and others said they were excited about the significance of reaching into the final frontier, the event also spurred anxieties about the United States falling behind in the space race. This fear prompted the federal government to send an influx of funding to astronomical researchers throughout the country, making Cambridge the nation’s astronomical Mecca as students kept their eyes cast upward to the skies.

ANYONE FOR SPUTNIKWATCHING?

On Oct. 16, The Crimson reported that five Lowell tutors wearing tuxedos gathered on Weeks Bridge to toast Sputnik as it soared over Cambridge at 6:09 a.m.

Throughout the semester, students tracked the exact time the satellite would be traveling over the city so they could catch a glimpse of the glittering, spindled orb as it completed its 98-minute orbit around the globe.

Charles I. Kingson ’59—who first used the term “Sputnikwatching” in an Oct. 18 Crimson article to describe the new sport—said 50 years later that students were both fearful of and enthralled by the satellite.

“People were very nervous because the Soviets were ahead of us in science,” he said. “But people were so fascinated by this thing going around in the sky.”

Kingson said that the combination of these feelings made the satellite something of a must-see attraction that also led him and other Sputnikwatchers to Weeks Bridge one chilly night armed with binoculars and a telescope to compete for the night’s first sighting.

But even those without equipment could take part in the excitement.

“You could see it with the naked eye,” he said.

FUNDING THE SPACE RACE

As the launch of Sputnik threw America into catch-up mode, funding for astrophysical research became very readily available, recalled Robert J. Davis ’51, who was a Harvard graduate student doing astronomy research at the time.

“The biggest thing I remember is the sudden release of billions of dollars from the federal government,” said Davis, whose job was to obtain time-keeping devices at the SAO.

According to a 2006 paper published by the Council on Governmental Relations, the non-defense federal research budget increased ten-fold in the decade following Sputnik.

“We didn’t worry about getting our expenses paid for graduate school,” Zimmerman said.

Cambridge became the focal area of the nation’s astrophysical research, according to Irwin I. Shapiro, who was a researcher at MIT at the time of Sputnik’s launch.

Michael R. Pearlman, who began working at the SAO in 1968, said the Soviet Union informed Whipple of the impending launch before it happened.

“The launch of a satellite by the Russians gave tremendous impetus for the Americans to push even harder with their space program,” Pearlman said.

With the subsequent launch of Sputnik II—nicknamed “Pupnik” for its canine passenger Laika—in Nov., SAO director Fred L. Whipple continued to use this space-fever to expand his center’s staff and research operations.

Then-astronomy professor Abraham Loeb said that Sputnik II and the subsequent satellites in the Sputnik series became the focus for the observatories.

“The observatory was the hub of activity of knowing where the satellites were and what they were doing,” said Shapiro.

Harvard’s and the Smithsonian’s observatories, which had been housed in the same building in Cambridge since 1955, together received more funding than any other comparable site, as a result of their combined size. (The two institutions merged in 1973 to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Shapiro went on to direct the Center from 1983 to 2004.)

Whipple created Operation Moonwatch in 1956 to arm people all over the world, from high school students to housewives, with small telescopes and stopwatches, to create teams of novice stargazers to monitor the skies for satellites.

Cambridge had its own Moonwatch Team based on the roof of the Observatory’s D Building.

According to a press release from the Center for Astrophysics following his death in 2004, Whipple’s group was the only one prepared for the launch.

Zimmerman said that among the researchers at the observatory there was no fear or politics associated with the Russian spacecraft.

“The real excitement was the technical achievement of getting something into orbit,” he said.

—Staff writer Chelsea L. Shover can be reached at clshover@fas.harvard.edu.