Retro: When the Russians sent Sputnik 1 into space in 1957, a Maryland senator advocated for the armed forces to shoot it down

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden gave the order to shoot down a balloon, termed a “weather balloon” by Chinese officials. Off the South Carolina coast, two F-22 fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base fired a Sidewinder air-to-air missile into the intruder, successfully bringing it down into choppy Atlantic waters.

An event of similar proportions that caused a case of worldwide jitters transpired in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into space, which like the Chinese balloon, was perceived to be an airborne intrusive spy.

Suddenly, an insular sense and security of place was shattered when the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik 1, a 184-pound, 23-inch diameter aluminum ball, which was the first man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth.

Another dimension that sent Americans in the predawn hours into backyards, onto roofs, and into parks armed with binoculars, telescopes and the naked eye, hoping to catch a glimpse of the intruder that orbited the Earth every 96 minutes, was the reality that the U.S. had been beaten into space by what many considered a backward nation.

“There have been times throughout history when people have said: ‘Things will never be the same again.’ Future historians, with a better perspective, may well mark Oct. 4, 1957, as one of those times,” observed The Sun in a 1977 20th anniversary Sputnik 1 article.

“The Soviet Union, a totalitarian nation where science and technology are the servants of the state, and where individual enterprise is supposedly stifled by Marxist orthodoxy, on that day 20 years ago astonished the world and embarrassed the United States by launching the world’s first artificial satellite,” reported the newspaper.

John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, said of Sputnik 1, that it was a “shock, a trauma for most Americans, who had assumed we were the overall technological leaders of the world: ‘Here’s these barbaric Bolsheviks over there accomplishing something we couldn’t do.’”

Sputnik 1’s radio emitted a constant “beep, beep, beep” sound, which led Clare Boothe Luce, a writer, politician and U.S. ambassador, to comment was “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.”

Baltimoreans craned their necks into the night sky or dawn’s early light hoping to witness the celestial visitor as it sailed 560 miles above the city safe from ground attack.

While President Dwight D. Eisenhower stewed about Sputnik as it streaked across the firmament, U.S. Sen. John Marshall Butler, a Republican from Maryland, a former partner in the Baltimore law firm of Venable, Baetjer and Howard, and a rabid anti-Communist, had an idea, albeit a technically impracticable one, given the times.

“Senator John Marshall Butler believes the United States should take a good aim and shoot Russian sputniks out of the skies as fast as they appear,” The Sun reported.

In a radio interview on WFBR-AM, Butler said: “I would like to see our armed forces shoot down Sputnik II.”

In subsequent remarks to The Sun, Butler, a World War I artillery veteran who should have known better, thundered: “I would like to see our armed forces just say to them, ‘You put them up and we’ll shoot them down.’ I think we’ll come to that someday, and it’s not too far off. The best way to deflate the propaganda value of Sputnik is to knock it out of the air.”

Sputnik 1 continued making its elliptical orbits of the Earth until Jan. 4, 1958, when it burned up reentering the earth’s atmosphere.

Its lingering effect was to further Cold War anxieties and set off a 12-year space race between the U.S. and Russia that culminated in 1969 when Apollo 11 delivered two astronauts onto the moon’s surface.

Sputnik 1 also permanently altered the national educational landscape. Suddenly there was a greater emphasis on science, engineering and math, because somehow or other, as a nation, the U.S. had fallen behind in these pursuits.

But before the Sputnik 1 fun was over, a Baltimore wag, who was also a Glenn L. Martin Co. aerospace worker, penned lyrics published in The Sun that were to be sung to the music of “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the 1933 popular hit with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Yip Harburg and Billy Rose.

“Oh, it’s only a Russian moon,

Spinning ‘round in a troubled sky;

But the thing that’s got us really shook

Is what got it up so high.

Oh, we were working frantically

To get our moon into space;

But since slave labor turned the tide

Ours will finish in second place.”

On the 20th year observance of Sputnik 1`s taking to the skies, a Sun editorial remarked: “From Baltimore backyards and Bombay housetops they peered at the new apparition in the night sky with that prickle down the spine which says, ‘This will be something to tell my grandchildren.’”