When we were creating our company for manufactuting our first FPV micro drone racer and considering its possible name, we remembered that Russia was the first country to launch an artificial Earth satellite. This is a great inspiration for us when designing our products.

Sputnik-1 was the first artificial Earth satellite, a Soviet spacecraft, which was launched on October 4th 1957. This date is considered to be the beginning of the space era for humanity.

Designing of Sputnik began in November 1956, and in the beginning of September 1957 it passed the final tests. Sputnik was designed as an elementary spacecraft with two beacons for conducting trajectory changes. The frequency ranges of the transmitters of the simple spacecraft were chose in such a way that even radio enthusiasts could keep track of it.

Sputnik was launched from the Research Landfill of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR “Tyura-Tam” (which was later named Baikonur Cosmodrome) on a mother missile.

In 295 seconds after the launch Sputnik and the rocket’s central block weighing 7,5 tons were launched into the elliptical orbit with the height of 947 km at apogee and 288 km at perigee. In 314,5 seconds after the launch the detachment of Sputnik took place and it called. “Beep! Beep!” – that’s how its callsigns sounded. They were tracked for about two minutes at the landfill, after that Sputnik crossed the horizon. The people at the landfill ran outside shouting “Hooray!” and congratulated the constructors and soldiers.

Sputnik’s flight took 92 days, by January 4th 1958 he had orbited the Earth 1440 times (about 60 million km). His beacons functioned for about two weeks after the launch. Despite the fact that there was no scientific equipment on Sputnik, studying the nature of the radio signal and optical observations of the orbit provided the scientists with important scientific data.