Where Did Sputnik Get its Name?

On October 5, 1957, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced that the Soviet Union had launched a 184 pound object into Earth orbit. That first artificial satellite has since come to be known in the English-speaking world as Sputnik. In the West it is now widely assumed that the Soviets chose the word sputnik as the name for their satellite because it means “fellow traveler.” This is not what actually happened.

The world first learned of the launch from this brief report in Pravda. Though the story was printed on the front page above the fold, it ran under the bland headline “TASS Report”. A few dry paragraphs spoke of a long-standing dream in the scientific community about the possibility of creating “an artificial Earth satellite.” Only in paragraph three did they come to the point, stating that the Soviet Union has brought this dream to fruition. The article went on to give a few facts and figures about the new satellite and advice for viewing it or listening to its radio signals. No name for the satellite was mentioned.

Despite the fact that Pravda buried the lede, the announcement created an international sensation. Foreign papers repeated the announcement the same day in blaring full-width front page headlines. The next day, as Soviet leaders realized what a propaganda coupe this was, Pravda also dedicated the entire front page to coverage under the full-width headline “The World’s First Artificial Satellite of Earth Was Made in the Soviet Union!”. Articles above the fold included A Triumph of Soviet Science and Technology and The Most Impudent Dreams of Mankind Become Reality.

Today when we hear the word “satellite” we assume that a man-made object is meant, but in 1957 this needed to be made explicit. Up to then the word “satellite” primarily meant a natural satellites such the moons of Earth or Jupiter. The situation was similar in Russian. That is why Pravda had to spell out what was meant writing that this was an “artificial satellite of Earth”.

Because the concept of an “artificial satellite” had been purely theoretical and relatively obscure, there apparently was not yet a well-established term for such a device. For several days the Western press struggled with what to call it. In the first few days Pravda’s wordy “an artificial satellite of Earth” was used, but it was also called “the device” and even “the Red moon”. In Washington, a journalist named [can’t find the reference] was asked for suggestions for a less awkward description. He took the phrase искусcтвеyный спутник Земли (artificial satellite of Earth) from Pravda, kept only the key word, and left it untranslated: sputnik. The suggestion was soon widely adopted and Sputnik became the Western name of the Soviet satellite.

For several decades those writing about it in English continued to show awareness that Sputnik was an informal term for the spacecraft. For example, after the Soviet Union launched a second artificial satellite, an article in Scientific American discussed tracking them and included a graph with lines labeled Sputnik I and Sputnik II, but in the body of the article they were referred using translations of the Russian designations: The First Satellite and The Second Satellite.

“Sputnik” never attained the status of a proper name in Russian and probably never will since calling a sputnik “Sputnik” would be redundant and therefor silly. The Russian-language press continues to refer to Sputnik I simply as “the first artificial sputnik of Earth” (note the lower case) and to report on the launch of American sputniki.

So why do English speakers now believe that the Soviets named their satellite “Sputnik”? This misunderstanding seems to arise from the oft-repeated statement that sputnik means “fellow traveler”. This is taken to mean that the word sputnik was chosen as a fanciful name for the space craft. In reality what is being explained is the origin of the Russian word for astronomical satellites. The fanciful comparison was coined hundreds of years earlier to talk about moons. This confusion can be traced to an article in the New York Times of October 6, 1957 entitled Soviet ‘Sputnik’ Means A Traveler’s Traveler.

The English word “satellite” has a similar origin. It once meant an attendant of a person of importance. Imagine the confusion which could have occurred if the US had launched the first artificial satellite and neglected to name it. It is only a slight stretch to imagine the Soviet press writing, “the Americans named their sputnik Satellite which means ‘an entourage member’.”

In conclusion, the belief that the Soviets named their satellite Sputnik after the Russian word for “fellow traveler” is false even though that is the literal meaning of the word sputnik. They called it “sputnik” because that is the normal Russian word for satellite. Naming it “Sputnik” would have been silly. When they failed to name it at all the Western press stepped in and adopted the Russian word for satellite as its proper name in English.

Sources

• Scan Pravda, October 5, 1957
  (The “TASS Report” occupies the two columns at the far right at the top.)
• Сообщение ТАСС, Pravda, October 5, 1957
  (As scan showing just the “TASS Report”)
• Сообщение ТАСС, Pravda, October 5, 1957
  (Text of the “TASS Report” in Russian)
• TASS Report, Pravda, October 5, 1957
  (English translation of article provided by NASA. Note the blurb at the top which repeats the myth that the Soviets named their satellite.)
• Soviet Fires Earth Satellite Into Space, The New York Times, October 5, 1957
  (Note that no name for the satellite is given and the word sputnik does not appear.)
• Front page, Pravda, October 6, 1957
  (Now that the launch is a worldwide sensation, Pravda also runs multiple stories under a full-width headline.)
• Scan of Pravda, October 6, 1957
  (We can see that stories about the satellite launch take up most of page one and all of pages two and three.)
• Soviet ‘Sputnik’ Means A Traveler’s Traveler, New York Times, October 6, 1957, p 46
• The aftermath of the Sputnik launch
  (Source of the photographs of Pravda listed above)
• Sputnik and US Intelligence: The Warning Record, Studies in Intelligence (Includes a photograph of the front page of the October 5, 1957 New York Times.)
• Sputnik 1, Wikipedia
• Chronology of 1957: The Beginning of the Space Age
  (Includes references to news coverage.)
• Memorandum of Conference with the President, October 9, 1957
  (Now know as the Sputnik Memo this document describes a meeting of president Eisenhower and some of his advisers to discuss the satellite launch. In the memo the satellite is nameless, referred to as “the earth satellite”, “the Russian satellite”, and “the missile”.
• Описание в начале 1744 года явившейся кометы купно с некоторыми учиненными об ней рассуждениями, Gottfried Heinsius, translated by Mikhail Lomonosov
  (Early use use of sputnik to refer to an orbiting body. Notes that a precise calculation of the extent of the atmosphere of the Great Comet of 1744 requires facts which we could learn only from observing the motions of a sputnik revolving around it. Sadly, the author notes, this is impossible because the comet has no sputnik.)