It's Called Sputnik!

We know.  Anywayz, Happy 68th Birthday, Space Age!  Here's Alexei Leonov recounting the big event in Two Sides of the Moon:

While we were making final preparations for our graduation ceremony, the astounding news came through that on 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1 into space. Everyone broke into spontaneous applause. We clapped each other on the back, congratulated ourselves on being the first country in the world to launch an artificial satellite. 

We were very proud of what Sputnik demonstrated to the world about the Soviet Union’s advanced level of technology. We had no idea how spaceflight would progress from there—we thought it would be many years before a man would be launched into Earth orbit—but I was enthralled. 

Within hours of Sputnik being launched the Soviet poet Nikolai Krivanchikov wrote a short verse which caught my imagination. 

The day will come when we will embark on interstellar flight.
Who can prevent us from dreaming such dreams,
When it was Lenin who taught us how to dream?
All planets in the universe are waiting to be discovered.
We will chart the fifth ocean of space.
Chkalov set us on this path. 

Valery Chkalov, one of the Soviet Union’s most famous early aviators, was a hero of mine. This poem has had great significance for me all through my life.

Dave Scott's take:

I was in a beer hall in Cologne when the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 into space. It was Oktoberfest and I loved to go to Germany to drink the beer. So there we were, a bunch of bachelors taking it easy. The Germans had strung a model of the Sputnik from the ceiling of the beer hall and there it was as we drank our beer, above our heads, making its distinctive “beep, beep, beep.” 

I remember people looking at us and could almost hear what they must have been thinking: “What’s wrong with you Americans? The Russians have the Sputnik up there.” They all thought the Sputnik was great...

Through reading the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, I was vaguely aware that our own attempts at launching a space satellite were not going well. But the paper did not convey the serious national angst being felt back home in the United States about the fact that the Russians were beating us into space. 

When the US Navy’s Vanguard rocket attempted to launch a satellite on 6 December 1957, and it exploded only a few feet into the air—eliciting such headlines in the mainstream press as “Flopnik!” and “Kaputnik!”—we were not aware of the consternation it caused. We did not have too much contact with our friends and family at home; long-distance communications were not too good back then.

Fortunately, our Germans were indeed better than their Germans...