>beep... beep... beep... beep... beep...
Beep... beep... beep... beep... beep
Chase Edwards
Luke Cox
the sound that haunted america
Jeremiah Brown
Russia
STROOOOOONG
Dylan Nguyen
Did it really do that beeping sound? If so, why?
Jayden Foster
Yes it would beep really loudly in space so we could hear it from down here
Jose Ward
>t. spock
Levi Peterson
based civ 5 knower
Henry Reyes
>For me, the terror—the real terror, as opposed to whatever demons and bogeys which might have been living in my own mind—began on an afternoon in October of 1957. I had just turned ten. And, as was only fitting, I was in a movie theater: the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut. The Saturday matinee on that day when the real terror began was Earth vs. the flying Saucers… Just as the saucers were mounting their attack on Our Nation’s Capital in the movie’s final reel, everything just stopped. The screen went black. The theater was full of kids, but there was remarkably little disturbance. If you think back to the Saturday matinees of your misspent youth, you may recall that a bunch of kids at the movies has any number of ways of expressing its pique at the interruption of the film or its overdue commencement—rhythmic clapping; that great childhood tribal chant of “We-want-the-show! We-want-the-show! We-want-the-show!”; candy boxes that fly at the screen; popcorn boxes that become bugles. If some kid has had a Black Cat firecracker in his pocket since the last Fourth of July, he will take this opportunity to remove it, pass it around to his friends for their approval and admiration, and then light it and toss it over the balcony. None of these things happened on that October day. The film hadn’t broken; the projector had simply been turned off. And the house-lights began to come on, a totally unheard-of occurrence. We sat there looking around, blinking in the light like moles.
Asher Davis
>The manager walked into the middle of the stage and held his hands up—quite unnecessarily—for quiet… We sat there in our seats like dummies, staring at the manager. He looked nervous and sallow—or perhaps that was only the footlights. We sat wondering what sort of catastrophe could have caused him to stop the movie just as it was reaching that apotheosis of all Saturday matinee shows, “the good part.” And the way his voice trembled when he spoke did not add to anyone’s sense of well-being. “I want to tell you,” he said in that trembly voice, “that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it…Spootnik.” I remember this very clearly: cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice, whether that of a boy or a girl I do not know; a voice that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger: “Oh, go show the movie, you liar!” The manager did not even look toward the place from which that voice had come, and that was somehow the worst thing of all. Somehow that proved it. The Russians had beaten us into space. Somewhere over our heads, beeping triumphantly, was an electronic ball which had been launched and constructed behind the Iron Curtain…The manager stood there for a moment longer, looking out at us as if he wished he had something else to say but could not think what it might be. Then he walked off and pretty soon the movie started up again… Terror…often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking… We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris… we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation.
Colton Jenkins
>Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: PIONEER SPIRIT. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America’s PIONEER SPIRIT… [it might have come] right out of a John Wayne movie: “Come on, you suckers, do you want to live forever? Where’s your PIONEER SPIRIT?” This was the cradle of elementary political theory and technological dreamwork in which I and a great many other war babies were rocked until that day in October, when the cradle was rudely upended and all of us fell out. For me, it was the end of the sweet dream, and the beginning of the nightmare. The children grasped the implication of what the Russians had done as well and as quickly as anyone else…The big bombers that had smashed Berlin and Hamburg in World War II were even then, in 1957, becoming obsolete. A new and ominous abbreviation had come into the working vocabulary of terror: ICBM [inter-continental ballistic missile]. The ICBMs we understood, were only the German V-rockets grown up. They would carry enormous payloads of nuclear death and destruction, and if the Russkies tried anything funny, we would simply blow them right off the face of the earth. Watch out, Moscow! Here comes a big, hot dose of the PIONEER SPIRIT for you, you turkeys!
Kevin Gutierrez
>Except that somehow, incredibly, the Russians were looking pretty good in the old ICBM department themselves. After all, ICBMs were only big rockets, and the Commies certainly hadn’t lofted Sputnik I into orbit with a potato masher. And in that context, the movie began again in Stratford, with the ominous, warbling voices of the saucerians echoing everywhere: “Look to your skies…a warning will come from your skies…look to your skies…” Because I am a horror novelist and also a child of my times, and because I believe that horror does not horrify unless the reader or viewer has been personally touched, you will find the autobiographical element constantly creeping in. Horror in real life is an emotion that one grapples with all alone—as I, all alone, grappled with the realization that the Russians had beaten us into space. It is a combat waged in the secret recesses of the heart.
Carter Bailey
Reminder that CIA killed an American president for this.
Logan Hernandez
Bentley Thomas
Based
Nathan Rivera
imagine, collectively as a nation, being that assravaged
Eli Hughes
tl dr please
Colton Collins
>Soviets launch Sputnik, American kids become angry that their country wasn't number one at something and scared of Soviet missiles.
Matthew Fisher
It transmitted a beeping sound. IIRC this gave valuable information about the atmosphere, as the signal allowed people on earth to track it orbiting.
Logan Campbell
>Yeah we strong, we best, we kick everybody's ass!
>Oh no, they strong too, everybody run!
That isn't chad behaviour
Owen Foster
America is basically a child. A spoiled child of Europe.
Carson Carter
Yes, in order to track the satellite.
upload.wikimedia.org
> Korolev and his team also took a far more pragmatic approach to tracking their satellite than did the Americans. They realized that the geography of the USSR spanned 11 time zones many of which were populated by active Amateur Radio operators. It was decided to exploit this resource and construct the satellite radio transmitter around frequencies that amateurs across the Soviet Union could monitor using their existing equipment. As early as June 1957, the Russian language magazine Radio, an official Soviet publication widely read by Russian amateurs, began publishing a series of articles that described the telemetry system of a planned satellite and its intended downlink frequencies on 20 and 40 MHz 8 . [After the launch of Sputnik I, an English translation of this article was published in QST.]
web.archive.org
Sebastian Russell
based russia bringing the bantz