Sputnik for sale, if you'll settle for a beeping replica

The original Sputnik fell out of orbit and burned up three months after its launch. This could be your chance to make Sputnik beep again

It was on Oct. 4, 1957, just 60 years ago, that the Soviet Union launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik. It was little more than an aluminum beach ball with a radio transmitter that sent out a regular series of radio beeps, but it expanded the Cold War to outer space, shook up American technological smugness and probably helped John Kennedy get elected president in 1960.
 
On Wednesday, just ahead of the 60th anniversary of its launch, a replica of the famous satellite is going on sale at Bonhams in New York City as part of their “Air and Space Sale.” Another item on the block is the harness, complete with camera, and an oxygen tank for the rhesus monkeys that preceded America’s Mercury astronauts into space.
 
The original Sputnik fell out of orbit and burned up three months after its launch. But test models and engineering replicas, allegedly from the laboratory where the legendary Sergei Korolev built them, have surfaced in museums and collections in recent years — “some more authentic than others,” said Robert Pearlman, a journalist and space historian who runs the website Collectspace.
 
Ten years ago, a journalist for The New York Times visited one in the possession of Richard Garriott, a video-game designer and son of former astronaut Owen K. Garriott. He said he had smuggled the shell of the satellite out of Russia as a pair of salad bowls.
 

Replica of Sputnik satellite going on sale at Bonhams in New York City

This replica now being put on sale was built for electromagnetic tests, according to the documentation that comes with it, and comes complete with a vintage East German radio receiver to hear the iconic beeps. Adam Stackhouse, who organised the Air and Space sale, said they had obtained it through an intermediary from a collector in Austria. It was checked out by an expert on Russian space hardware, Mr Stackhouse said, but he admitted that they did not have a complete paper trail tracing it back to Energia, the company that absorbed Korolev’s lab.
 
 “You always want more,” Mr. Stackhouse said, “but in the end you are tracking history.”
 
On Friday morning, however, the Sputnik was subjected to what might be a crucial test. Mr. Stackhouse, who had flown in from Bonhams San Francisco office for the event, turned on the Cold War-era radio receiver and pulled a plug that activated the Sputnik’s battery. Within seconds, rhythmic, noisy pulses were emanating from the East German speakers.
 
All across the world in the fall of 1957, especially in America, people tuned into those pulses as a new addition to the heavens passed overhead and wondered what the future would bring.
 
Although our robots have wandered farther and higher since then, they are still wondering.

© 2017 The New York Times News Service