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Why are there as much as 41 sputniks?

Question by Anita: why are there 41 sputniks?
the first one orbited the earth. but what did the others do? where they the same thing?
does sputnik has aything to do with the cold war?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Irina A
Sputnik was actually what won the Space Race(incorectly thought of as the moon race by the general population).

Answer by Smart Ambitious
You can find the anser to your question in details at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik

Answer by Bill
I believe it was a Sputnik that took the first dog into space.

Amusingly, the Soviets beat us to the moon. However, it was an unmanned probe, and it crashed into the moon (instead of making a safe landing). So it doesn’t really count.
But I don’t think that was a Sputnik, it had some other name, like Luna or something.

Answer by aviophage
The first artificial satellite launched by human effort was named Sputnik 01. This happened in the middle of the most intense part of the cold war, and Americans were being taught to hate and fear Russians for political reasons similar to the reasons why the current occupant of the White House insisted in 2002 that Americans should hate and fear Saddam Hussein.

So a lot of Americans were persuaded by greedy politicians to believe that Sputnik was the forerunner of lots of Russian space weapons that would enable them to enslave us. A lot of folks were really scared, and you might think of the launching of Sputnik 01 as the “World Trade Center disaster” of the 1950s.

But it DID have the beneficial effect of making it possible for the government to raise the money for the space program that has continued ever since.

And the Russian space program has since launched numerous other satellites, some of them also named “Sputnik,” which means “little brother.”

===Edit===

Yes, it was Sputnik 02 that carried the cute little dog named Laika into orbit. She did just fine until the food, water, and oxygen ran out. The world was really upset when it became obvious that Laika would die because there was no way to bring her back. It was very sad.

They went on to launch and recover a number of dogs, and most of them lived long and happy lives afterward. But I never forgave them for letting Laika die on purpose.

If I met Vladimir Putin, I would probably punch him in the nose, for which I would almost certainly be handcuffed and dragged away to jail. Then I would have to explain to the judge that I punched him because of Laika.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, I suppose.

Answer by lindajune
The Sputnik program was a series of unmanned space missions launched by the Soviet Union in the late 1950s to demonstrate the viability of artificial satellites for exploring the upper atmosphere as part of the International Geophysical Year.
The reason for the Sputnik program was the same as the reason for the US Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo programs – a space race (one of the consequences of the Cold War).

Sputnik 1 was the first man-made object to orbit earth – this put Russia one-to-nothing ahead of the US in the space race.

The other Sputniks each had a different purpose, for example:
– Sputnik 8 was an orbiting launch platform used to launch Venera 1 successfully to Venus
– Sputnik 11 is called Vostok 1 and was the first manned spacecraft – it carried cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit
– Sputnik 25 was an attempt at a lunar soft landing (it didn’t manage to leave Earth orbit and it fell back to Earth)
– Sputnik 20 was to be a Venus landing mission (if failed in Earth orbit and fell to Earth 5 days later)
– Sputnik 40 was to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sputnik 1, and was built by students at the Polytechnic Laboratory of Nalchikand
– Sputnik 41 also carried a radio transmitter

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