The launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial moon, sparked reactions ranging from wonderment at the exploit to near-hysteria in the United States at the implications of Soviet dominance of space.Here is a selection of quotes from this key event of the 20th century:
- "A greater defeat for our country than Pearl Harbor": Edward Teller, father of the US hydrogen bomb
- "What is at stake is nothing less than our survival": Senator Mike Mansfield
- "An intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority": US congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce
- "[Sputnik is] a hunk of iron almost anybody could launch." US Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett
- "[The Soviets could one day be] dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses": Senate majority leader (later president) Lyndon Johnson
- "I say without hesitation and without excuse that this is a turning point in history. Never has the threat of Soviet Communism been so great, or the need for countries to organize themselves against it": British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, speaking to the House of Commons in November 1957, on the need for Western Europe and the United States to strengthen ties
- "(...) The day is not far distant when they [the Soviets] could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the earth's surface": Chicago Daily News
- "Myth has become reality: Earth's gravity conquered:" French daily Le Figaro
- "This government needs to start telling the truth to the American people. Quit kidding ourselves, and quit trying to fool our friends and our neighbors. And by that I mean let's find out just where we stand in this race and this armament picture, and let's find out just what we're going to do about it. Let's quit acting as if nothing happened, because something has happened and it has embarrassed us throughout the world": Sen. Hubert Humphrey
- "Oh little Sputnik, flying high / With made-in-Moscow beep, / You tell the world it's a Commie sky / and Uncle Sam's asleep": Poem composed by Mennen Williams, then Democratic governor of Michigan.
