Fifty years ago this week — on October 4, 1957, to be exact — a 100-tonne rocket blasted off from the steppes of Kazakhstan, then a part of the Soviet Union, and placed in orbit the first artificial satellite to girdle the globe. It weighed 83 kg, was roughly the size of a basketball and its beeps, as it circled the planet every 98 minutes, signalled the dawn of the Space Age.
Coming as it did, at the height of the Cold War, it also triggered off what was to be become a bitterly fought Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, that ended only when the Soviet Union itself broke up, leading the new Russia as well as the U.S. to join hands with other nations to create an International Station.
