Sputnik launch started space race, shaped University of Iowa physics program

IOWA CITY - Just days after stepping onto the University of Iowa campus as a freshman engineering major, a 17-year-old Don Gurnett redirected his focus skyward.

'They used to post a time at which you could watch Sputnik go over in the newspaper, and I remember doing that very vividly, watching this spacecraft go overhead,” said Gurnett, who today is 77 and a UI professor. 'I did that almost within the first day after it was launched. ... I was very impressed by that.”

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957 - 60 years ago today - amounting to a sort-of surprise attack at the height of the Cold War. Although just the size of a beach ball, the symbolic mammoth fueled U.S. fears about an intelligence gap, power shift and possible security threat. And it started a space race that would lead to significant and lasting advancement both nationally and in Iowa City.

'As a consequence of Sputnik, NASA provided funds to build a new (UI) physics building (called the Physics Research Center) in 1965,” Gurnett said. 'In the mid-1980s, the Physics Research Center was renamed Van Allen Hall.”

Gurnett - one of the world's pre-eminent astrophysicists, having participated in more than 40 space missions and helping discover magnetic fields around Jupiter, Saturn and Mars - remembers well the uproar in 1957 that fanned this country's competitive fire.

He felt it personally, reading all he could about the satellite and U.S. efforts to match it - if not surpass it. In his research, a local hero emerged.

University of Iowa professor James Van Allen had been looped in to work on scientific instrumentation for Explorer I - which launched on Jan. 31, 1958 and became the United States' first successful spacecraft and answer to the Soviet's Sputnik I and II. Among the Explorer instruments under Van Allen's direction was a Geiger-Muller tube that discovered what would eventually be called the Van Allen radiation belt.

'That was the first great discovery of the Space Age,” Gurnett said.

Van Allen made headlines for his work - landing on the cover of Time Magazine and capturing Gurnett's attention. Although new to college and green in the field of physics, Gurnett decided to pay Van Allen a visit.

'I couldn't resist going over to his office, given my interest in electronics and rocketry,” he said.

His first contact was with Van Allen's secretary, not Van Allen himself.

'She had me write down on a piece of paper what my qualifications were, and I said radio controlled electronics,” said Gurnett, who at just 10 years old developed a love for aeronautics that got him involved in a model airplane club and eventually working a part-time job at Collins Radio.

It was enough to land him a job under the famed scientist's wing.

'The next thing, I'm working on rockets down in Cape Canaveral,” he said. 'Going from high school, building model rockets, to working on real rockets within a year.”

Gurnett found himself thrust onto the battlefield of space exploration, where the Cold War was being fought and, he said, eventually would be thawed.

But it took years of federal resources and tremendous technical expansion, including the creation of NASA, numerous rocket failures, and eventually the Apollo mission to the moon in 1969.

'It wasn't until we landed Apollo on the moon that the United States effectively caught up to the Russians,” Gurnett said.

The neck-and-neck space race, although it didn't start this way, ended up bringing U.S. and Soviet scientists together, according to Gurnett.

'It was one of the few areas that I know of where there was actual communication between the Soviet Union and the United States,” he said. 'You would hope that would eventually lead to peace, which I think it did.”

l Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

About Sputnik

Name: Sputnik means 'companion.”

Launch date: Oct. 4, 1957

Launch site: Baikonur Cosmodrome at Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, then part of the former Soviet Union.

Diameter: 23 inches.

Weight: 184 pounds.

Antenna: Four, measuring 7 feet 10 inches to 9 feet 6 inches long.

Orbit height: 359 miles.

Number of orbits: 1,440

Miles traveled: More than 43.4 million

Mission duration: 21 days.

Source: NASA