"I was nine at the time, growing up within 25 miles of Strategic Air Command headquarters, and just a few years beyond my literal understandings of such things as the 'Iron Curtain'-which I previously believed to be some kind of chain-mail drapery that I actually might be caught behind. Suddenly, there was a new Communist threat passing right overhead, and I recall spending many a dinnertime trying to convince my parents of our need for a bomb shelter."
-Chris Kuppig

"The launching of Sputnik...even to a 9 year old baby boomer...was, well, out of this world! It seemed so far removed from the reality of collecting baseball cards and playing cowboys and Indians! The whole space race was a perfect prelude to the 60s. In a word, before Sputnik everything was black and white...afterwards things were in color...until they got downright gawdy!
-Frank Ceresi

"Before Sputnik, there was talk of rockets and satellites, but, my father said no one would ever ride a rocket in space, or put a satellite around the earth, because there is nothing up there for the exhaust to push against. You can't steer it. No air for the tail to turn it with."

"My teacher said 'The Russians make all their women work just like the men. They don't let you go to church. And the children, why they make their parents give them up, put them in a place like an orphanage, where the government teaches them communism.'"

"And then, on that October day, when I was sixteen and the world changed, WMVA radio said the Communists had shot very straight, using a rocket, into the depths of space, and IT is flying OVER OUR HOMES, and THIS is what it SOUNDS LIKE."

"My father had the only pair of binoculars in the neighborhood. That night he led a crowd of us into a field not far from the house, and there, one by one, sharing the glasses, we saw it. . . to our eyes but a dot, a dim light smaller than the all but the faintest stars. But it was there. And it moved across our heavens and it dominated our world."
-Jesse H. Moore V

"According to my recollection and calculations, I was probably the fourth non-Soviet citizen to intercept, listen to, and record on magnetic tape, Sputnik I from an Air Force communications intelligence gathering site in West Germany October 4, 1957. The first US intercept was made by a CW operator by the name of Malcolm "Hogjaw" Allen and his NCOIC scolded and threatened him. Once ascertained that the signal was of import, I was ordered to put 24/7 recording equipment on the signal. It was only later that we were informed of the momentous event we had witnessed and it is only in the past year or so that we have been able to discuss events surrounding our work of over forty years in the past. This event, perhaps more than any other since the attack on Pearl Harbor, told us that we might be behind the curve and to get busy, educate, particularly in math and science, in order not to finish in second place."
-Brad Whipple

"I was 10 years old when Sputnik was in the sky. I remember going on the roof of our house on Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and watching it move across the sky, which it did at a pretty rapid rate of speed. Seems to me it was a blinking light, rather than a steady one, as we watched it, but I'm not sure of that. Even to a 10-year old, the whole thing was pretty amazing and earthshaking."
-Mike Shatzkin

"I was shocked. How could the Russians beat us? Were we looking at the beginning of a take over? Did they have atomic bomb technology that could devastate us in three or four shots? The questions came and went so quickly that I really didn't realize what I was feeling or asking."

"My two sons and I watched the evening skies with a range finder military glass I had purchased at the local Army - Navy surplus store. Why did Sputnik blink? Was Sputnik photographing our defense positions? What was Sputnik???"

"My oldest son, Bob, Jr., seemingly a bit less stressed by Sputnik's presence, adapted Sputnik to a personal need. Assigned to write a creative piece for his high school English class, he developed a sci-fi tale of future space exploration by combining the course of Sputnik through the heavens along with Gulliver's Travels and, with the title of Gullible's Travels submitted it. It was later serialized in the school newspaper."
-Robert F. Perkins

"What I remember is that Sputnik happened when I was in high school and that, when I went shortly thereafter to college, its presence in the skies made me-and many others-decide to study first-year Russian. It was a disaster, primarily because of a nearly complete shortage of qualified teachers of Russian. Mine were Russian émigré wives with American husbands but wretched teachers withal. Good at languages and an A student in high school, I nearly flunked it and, of course, developed an even deeper Cold War suspicion of the 'Russkies' than before that demonic little basketball went up."
-John F. Thornton

"As a reporter on a small newspaper in south Florida when Sputnik went up, I did the obvious: got local reaction. Most people I talked to, as I recall, wondered: 'What the hell are those "Russkies" up to?' Naturally, there were those who insisted it was all a hoax. When the Soviets later sent up the dog in a satellite I was working for the Nassau Guardian, in the Bahamas. For a headline we tossed around various names for the satellite: Dognik, Poochnik, Poodlenik and a bunch of other niks. We finally selected Muttnik. It rhymed with Sputnik. In the following months, we would write heated editorials sharply criticizing the Americans for shooting test missiles and rockets over the Bahamas from Cape Canaveral. Quoting Murphy's Law, we were certain one screwed up missile would plow up Nassau's main drag, Bay Street. Some years later, I met the first Soviet astronaut and the first Soviet woman astronaut, at a receptionist the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm. The lady was quite shapely. But that's another story."
-Robert Skole

"Being even a small part of history has always fascinated me. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957 was my first memory of a news event as a child. Only five-years-old, I guess I was precocious enough to know what was going on then, even at that tender age! As a kindergartener in Cuyaghoga Falls, Ohio, I was allowed to draw a diagram of Sputnik II, containing my version of the dog Laika, on a blackboard for my fellow classmates during show-and-tell. I'm not sure what the rest of my fellow kindergarteners thought of it at the time, but it led to a lifelong fascination with space for me. From viewing early earth satellites in the night skies of our back yard with my research chemist father, to my first jet airplane flight to Cape Canaveral as a high school junior in 1969 to witness the liftoff of Apollo 11, I've been fascinated with our space program. I have since toured the top space museums in both the U.S. and Russia and collect both U.S. and Russian space memorabilia, particularly from 1957 to 1962."
-Charles Schollenberger