To the son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the launch of the first man-made satellite 50 years ago was the first point in the score of a game in which his father's country triumphed.
"The Soviets won 3 to 1," Sergei Khrushchev said on Thursday. "The Soviets launched the first Sputnik, the first man in space, the first manned space station. ... Americans have one victory: The man on the moon."
Astronaut Jim Lovell, whose leadership of the Apollo 13 mission was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie of the same name, countered that the space race was just that.
"If you say landing on the moon is the finish line, we did [win]," Lovell said as Khrushchev stood nearby at the Adler Planetarium. "The Russians tried very desperately to land on the moon ... but failed."
Lovell, 79, and Khrushchev, 73, a US citizen and Brown University professor, were part of the planetarium's observance of Oct. 4, 1957, the day the Soviet Union launched the shiny, basketball-sized Sputnik I.
Both said the day remains fresh in their minds.
Khrushchev and his father were staying at a czarist-era palace in the western part of the Soviet Union when they got a call from a space official saying Sputnik was circling the globe.
"My father had a smile on his face. He was very proud. We were all very proud," said Khrushchev, who has a striking resemblance to his father.
A few hours later, they huddled excitedly around a radio to hear the satellite transmitting steady beeping sounds as it went by far above them.
Later that day, thousands of miles away in Milwaukee, young naval officer Lovell stepped outside as news broke of the successful Soviet launch. In amazement, he looked toward the sky to see Sputnik's spent rocket booster -- lit by the late-evening sun -- also in orbit.
For Lovell and other Americans, word that the Soviets had beaten the US into space came as a shock.
"I kept saying: `We got all these supposedly technical people, how come the Russians could suddenly put a satellite in an orbit and we can't do that?'" Lovell recalled.
Lovell said he's convinced the US could have put a satellite into space two years before the Soviets using military rocket technology. But he said president Dwight Eisenhower at the time did not want to employ military hardware for that task.
As it was, the US put its first satellite in space four months after Sputnik. Eleven years later, the US put men on the moon.
"It bothered my father that the US got to the moon first," Khrushchev said. "He intended to go to the moon, but he didn't want to pay for it. Putting money in Soviet agriculture and housing was a bigger priority."
Khrushchev said Sputnik inspired him to study science; in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, he worked in the Soviet space and missile programs.
Lovell readily credited Sputnik for spurred him and the whole country to push harder for successes in space.
"If it wasn't for Sputnik, we never would have gone to the moon when we did," he said.
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