The base of the jovial groove as the little group walked was a lilting, repeating riff on the kora, the 21-string harp-lute that a musician played with its base propped against his torso, plucking with his thumbs. â
The Vanguard team was still working on a test vehicle (TV-2) designed to test the first stage of the rocket when they learned of the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, by the USSR on October 4, 1957. On December 2, the Department of Defense announced the imminent launch of TV-3.
While it jolted the rest of the world, the successful launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, received casual treatment, at first, in Moscow. Korolev's former colleague, Academician Boris Rauschenbakh, told me, some 35 years later, Look up the pages of Pravda for the first day after the launch.