How a Drunk Driver Led to the Birth of Russia’s Sputnik 1

In the milieu of the Cold War, a roadside accident three generations ago led to Sputnik 1, and the beginning of a new era: the Space Age.

HAD IT NOT BEEN for a collision with a tree by a vodka-sodden driver on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia would not have put Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit around the Earth when it did. Sadly, history does not record the driver’s name.

It was 1957, and the Soviet Union’s brilliant but secretive rocket genius, Sergei Korolev — known to the West for decades only as ‘the Chief Designer’ — had been struggling against a lack of interest from the military and the Politburo in making the Soviet Union the first to launch ‘a little Moon’, as he dubbed it.

His explicit focus, he was told by the leather-clad apparatchiks who visited the desert plains of his secret launch site in Kazakhstan, should be to “build ICBMs”: intercontinental ballistic missiles that could hurl atomic bombs across continents.

These were the nascent days of the Cold War, when an arms race was heating up between two competing ideologies: market capitalism as proffered by its global champion, the United States of America; and the command economy of…