Documentary 2007 - Declassified: Sputnik (Part 6/6)

The world changed fifty years ago, on October 4, 1957, when the U.S. public heard the shocking news that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik I. Why didnt the U.S. beat the Soviets in this first crucial round of the space race? NOVA reveals an astonishing behind-the-scenes story of the politics and personalities that collided over the earliest efforts to get America into space, long before the founding of NASA. Anticommunist witch-hunts drove some of the nations most talented rocketry pioneers out of the country even as we welcomed Wernher von Braun and his former Nazi colleagues. With help from Walt Disney, von Brauns vision of future space travel swiftly captivated U.S. TV watchers. But even as he became the first media star of the Space Age, von Brauns attempts to build space probes were hobbled by inter-service rivalries. In Secrets of the Sputnik Race, NOVA details the previously untold story of the technological and political missteps that made the U.S. lose out to the Soviets bleeping electronic basketball.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• NASA
• Russia
• Sputnik
• Space
• Documentary

[granddad2002]

Dwight D. Eisenhower does not need apologist. You check the records of the US Congress after WW2; the machinery to go into any program had little political value. Von Braun had his program prior to the final solution... Himmler had charblache following the failed assination of Hitler to take any program for National Security purposes... that's how slave labor got into the underground rocket factories. Dwight knew and didn't act b.s. is frivolous arm chair debate.

[ikaCanadian]

Eisenhower was a silent badass

[adikted2wwe]

in the end i have an empty cup of knowledge about sputnik.

[saigokun]

Thanks for posting this interesting documentary.

[shaftster2001]

Awesome, thank you.

[bacurrie45]

thank you for uploading this i really enjoyed it