How Sputnik Launched an Era of Technological Fragility

On October 4, 1957, a beach ball-

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shaped satellite launched into space from the Kazakh desert. The satellite joined Earth’s journey around the sun, which is why its creators named it Sputnik, Russian for “traveling companion.” Sputnik circled the planet about every hour-and-a-half, traveling at 18,000 miles per hour as it emitted a steady beep, beep, beep. On the ground, people watched Sputnik through binoculars or listened to its pings on ham radios. By January of the following year, Earth’s traveling companion fell out of its orbit and burned up in the planet’s atmosphere. 

Sputnik’s spectators could not have anticipated that this event—the launch of the first human-made satellite into space—would ignite a race to the stars between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nor could they have known that they were, all of them, standing at the precipice of a new era in human history of near-complete reliance on satellite technology. For them, Sputnik was a sudden flash of innovation, something at which to marvel briefly. For their children and grandchildren and generations after, satellites would become the quiet infrastructure that powered the technology that runs their world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/sputnik-satellites/542022/