This article has an interesting angle although it misses the big picture and so neglects that we read Sputnik correctly.
The interesting angle is that the launch was not a broad Soviet plot to beat us in science:
When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.
But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age. ...
"Better than anyone else Korolyov understood how important it was to open the space era," Grechko said. "The Earth had just one moon for a billion years and suddenly it would have another, artificial moon!"
It wasn't the space era that opened. The Soviets weren't prepared to sustain a space race with America, who beat the Soviets to the moon (and we remain the only ones to walk--and drive--on the moon). This was all about nuclear missiles capable of reaching America from Russian soil:
As described by the former scientists, the world's first orbiter was born out of a very different Soviet program: the frantic development of a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb.
How unimportant that space race was is indicated by the fact that we haven't been to the moon in 35 years or so. And we can't go there now. We hope to in a decade, but the moon is beyond our reach despite that Sputnik-inspired space race.
More than a launching sterile space race, Sputnik represented a new threat to our homeland. A threat unstoppable by any defenses we could build--intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And in addition to reacting to the military threat clearly demonstrated, we also reacted to the threat that the Soviets pretended to be in the scientific realm:
The Sputnik crisis spurred a whole chain of U.S. initiatives, from large to small, many of them initiated by the Department of Defense.
-Within 2 days, calculation of the Sputnik Orbit (joint work by UIUC Astronomy Dept. and Digital Computer Lab.)
-By February 1958, the political and defense communities had recognized the need for a high-level Department of Defense organization to execute R&D projects and created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which later became the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.
-On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower formally brought the U.S. into the Space Race by signing the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA and later Project Mercury.
-Education programs initiated to foster a new generation of engineers. One of the more remarkable and remembered things that came out of this was the concept of "New Math".
-Dramatically increased support for scientific research. For 1959, Congress increased the National Science Foundation appropriation to $134 million, almost $100 million higher than the year before. By 1968, the NSF budget would stand at nearly $500 million.
-The Polaris missile program.
-Project management as an area of inquiry and an object of much scrutiny, leading up to the modern concept of project management and standardized project models such as the DoD Program Evaluation and Review Technique, PERT, invented for Polaris.
-The decision by President Kennedy, who campaigned in 1960 on closing the "missile gap", to deploy 1000 Minuteman missiles, far more ICBMs than the Soviets had at the time.
A simplest beeping toy sent up on the spur of the moment provided a propaganda victory for Moscow that sowed the seeds of the Soviet Union's defeat 42 years later by spurring us to technological advances that would overwhelm Moscow's civilian economy, outclass their military threat, and cause their utter collapse and total defeat.
Sputnik was a triumph of science--our science. Beep, beep.
