“Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sounded calm at an October 9, 1957, news conference, five days after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. When a reporter asked about national security concerns “with the Russian satellite whirling about the world,” Eisenhower tried to dispel any notion that the new object in the heavens should cause alarm. He insisted that a satellite represented a scientific development, not a military threat.