Sputnik crisis

The Sputnik crisis was a turning point of the Cold War that begun on October 4, 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite. The USA had believed itself to be the leader of space technology and thus a leader of missile development. The Sputnik launch proved it was not so. After this, the Space Race began, leading up to the Apollo program and the moon landings in 1969, which eventually ended the Sputnik crisis.

The Sputnik crisis spurred a whole chain of strategic initiatives, from large to small. Many of them initiated by the United States Department of Defense.

• The Space Race, as mentioned.
• The Polaris missile program.
• A new education programme was initiated to foster a new generation of engineers. One of the more remarkable and remembered things that came out of this was the concept of "New Maths".
• Project management was converted to an area of inquiry and an object of much scrutiny, leading up to the modern concept of project management and standardized project models such as the DoD Program Evaluation and Review Technique, PERT (invented for Polaris).
• At The Pentagon, at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency a computer network project called ARPANET started, which would later turn into the Internet.