George Brooks was at Princeton, and it was only days before an oral examination that he needed to do well on for his doctorate.

Brooks was a pioneer in the study of flutter in a helicopter's blades while at Langley Research Center. He had written on the subject, and he planned to astound examiners with his knowledge.

Image to right: George Brooks talks about Sputnik. Credit: NASA
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And then Sputnik went up. It was Oct. 4, 1957.

"So I'm due to march in and do my examination," Brooks says. "Of course, you're naturally very nervous anyway, and all of the stuff I had done on helicopter stability and math and all that stuff didn't seem to be of interest to anybody.

"(Instead) I get a grilling on spaceflight. 'How come?' 'How does it stay up there?' 'Why do you need this much velocity to get there?' And 'why aren't we first?' "

The Princeton faculty asked the same questions others did, even many of those with an insiders' interest in space.

"I was shocked, to tell you the truth," says James Penland, now a distinguished research associate at Langley, then working on the X-15 rocket-plane.

"I thought that we were ahead of everybody in that regard. There was a sort of bewilderment, really, as to why we were behind when we could have just as easily been ahead."

He wasn't alone in that assessment.

"Most of us knew that (Wernher) Von Braun had a Redstone (at Huntsville, Ala.) that could put up a satellite any day, and we sort of wished that the politics could have been different and we could have beaten the Russians," says Bill Kinard, then a young scientist at Langley, now the senior scientist with the materials International Space Station project.

Image to right: Bill Kinard talks about Sputnik. Credit: NASA
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Most of the public was more fixated on a new television sit-com, "Leave It to Beaver," debuting that day. Their knowledge of space came from science fiction TV and movies, and they knew about Russians from something called the Cold War.

Even the Russians weren't sure of what they had. Moscow newspapers presented the launch as just another story. But the day after American newspapers seemed awestruck and panicky about the Russians space prowess, Pravda extolled the launch as an example of the success of Communism.

The Cold War got colder when Sputnik went up.

"I remember the drills of getting under your desk as part of the Cold War and threat of attack," says John Paulson, 8 years old then. He later retired from Langley as head of the Vehicle Analysis Branch.

"Then, all of a sudden, this thing got put up."

Imaginations soared with Sputnik.

"The Russians had put something up that flew over our house," Paulson says. "Then tomorrow we probably had a drill in school as to what to do if they dropped the bomb on us."

Sharon Stack wondered the same thing, and even more vividly because she was 14 and living in Omaha, Neb., where her father worked at Strategic Air Command Headquarters.

Her fear was mixed with fascination.

"I do remember seeing it somewhere in the sky with those lights blinking," says Stack, who came to Langley as a math-trained, human "computer" six years later and retired in 2003.

"You could actually see it in the sky, and with the Cold War, it was frightening."

For many, science fiction turned to science fact on that day.

"It certainly got the country talking about space, and I never really paid attention to space before then," Stack says.

Image to right: Jim Penland talks about Sputnik. Credit: NASA
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Helicopter research became history for Brooks.

"It was a turning point for me," he says. "When I left (Princeton) to come back to Langley, overnight it was changed to space. … The writing was on the wall."

And the writing was in a letter from center director Floyd Thompson to Bill Michael, who had left Langley to work at Martin Co. in Baltimore.

"I got a letter from Dr. Thompson a little after Sputnik," Michael says. "He said 'good things are happening, and we're probably going to get in the space business soon.' "

Thompson asked Michael to come back, and the answer was yes. He stayed for the next quarter century, working on space.

The center Michael returned to in March, 1958, was operated under the auspices of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as it had been since going into business in 1917. Seven months later, there was a new governing boss.

"That was the whole thing," Michael says of the creation of NASA to add a space dimension to flight research. "It was space, space!"

And the race was on, and the Soviet Union had the lead.

"We were very surprised that the Russians had that kind of technology and that they were that far ahead of us," says Ed Kilgore, who retired as associate administrator of NASA in 1982. "Right then, we were all inwardly resolved that this wasn't going to last, that we were going to do something about it."

Even a reply with Explorer I in January of 1958 was little salve for U.S. feelings.

"We should have done it about five months earlier and been in front of the Russians," Kinard says.

At Langley and elsewhere, there was a desire to not only get into the space game, but to figure out a way to win it quickly.

But how?

"There was a lot of confusion in the halls of NASA as to what to do," says Michael. "Then somebody said, 'why not do a space station? We'll beat them to that.' "

"But they had giant rockets and we had all the small rockets. So somebody said, 'they'll beat us to that, too.' "

The answer came after a bit more thought.

" 'What about the moon?' " Michael remembers.

And so some young, energetic researchers set about developing a lunar project.

Researchers like Bob Tolson, a student at Virginia Tech when Sputnik was launched but working at NASA Langley a few months later.

"I was too busy doing homework to worry about global ideas," he says, laughing and then admitting, "I remember sitting around my FM radio and listening to the 'beep, beep, beep' like everybody else. I'm not sure it signaled anything."

His first charge at Langley was "figuring out how to get a man to the moon and back," says Tolson, now a distinguished professor at the National Institute of Aerospace.

"Sputnik had an effect on me. I decided I wanted to study space."

So did Michael. And Kinard.

"It was a very exciting time for a young man to be out of school," Kinard says.

And running in the space race.

Jim Hodges
NASA Langley Research Center