These days, however, Sputnik is remembered as the moment of national reckoning rather than a knee-jerk response to a Cold War humiliation. Americans recognise it as a wake-up call that spurred the nation into urgent action. For them, it embodies the realisation that the US significantly lagged its adversary, which helped prompt a surge in innovation and effort that led to the US landing a man on the moon in 1969, unleashing a personal computer revolution in the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, a cellular phone revolution in the 1990s, an internet boom in the late 1990s, a smartphone and social media revolution in 2007 and electric vehicle (EV) revolution, with the first Tesla cars hitting the road in 2008.
In October 1957, at the start of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a low-earth orbit satellite, sending shockwaves through the world. It was seen as the ultimate humiliation for America. The narrative at the time was that the US had fallen behind its then archrival on a key military technology with a secretive system whose capabilities other governments could not comprehend.
