Commemorative stamps of the launch of Sputnik 1

Sputnik 1 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on October 4th, 1957 at 22:28 and 34 seconds, Moscow time. The rocket that carried the small Soviet satellite in orbit was an intercontinental ballistic missile, the first of its kind, modified for the occasion, the R-7 Semyorka. Sputnik 1 was placed in an elliptical, stable orbit, with a perigee altitude of 288 km and apogee of 947 km. It took 96 minutes for one full orbit, traveling at a speed of about 28,000 km/h. The first radio telescope to capture its signal was the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Britain. The repeated "beep", on which every amateur sufficiently expert could tune, decreed the actual start of the space age. Sputnik continued to broadcast its “beep” for 21 days before the batteries ran out. Then, the friction caused the satellite to lose gradually altitude. Eventually, it rushed into the atmosphere and disintegrated almost completely, on January 4th, 1958. It had been in orbit for 92 days, completing 1,440 orbits, for a total of about 60 million km.