Russian media mark 50 years in space

Sputnik was seen as a great coup for the Soviet Union

The Russian media have been feeding their audiences small nuggets of Soviet-era nostalgia as the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of the start of the space age.

Thursday's news bulletins on the main national television networks showed black-and-white archive footage from 1957, when the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union.

Newspapers have highlighted some of the patriotic sentiments the event inspired at the time.

'Global resonance'

Television channels have been reminding their viewers of the impact the launch had on the public mood.

"The people who created Sputnik had no idea of the global resonance that this small, metallic ball would have," said state-controlled Channel One.

"In the blink of an eye, it changed the balance of political power, made the USSR into a superpower, and people around the world started to dream of conquering the universe."

The channel showed veteran cosmonauts and designers laying flowers at the Kremlin graves of Soviet space pioneers including Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Sergei Korolyov, the "father" of the Soviet space programme.

The state-owned Rossiya channel said that Soviet scientists "had opened a new page in the mastery of space" by launching Sputnik.

"It's no exaggeration that this short call sign shook the world," the channel said. "For mankind, the launch of the first satellite marked the start of a new space age."

Rossiya also marked the occasion by airing a documentary on the role played by dogs in the development of space travel.

The other major channel, NTV, showed Sergei Ivanov, first deputy prime minister and one of the favourites to succeed Vladimir Putin as president, showing schoolchildren round Russia's flight control centre just outside Moscow.

In a live videolink from the International Space Station, a cosmonaut told the children that although having pets on board would make things "cosy", animals found it far harder than humans to adapt to life in space.

West 'in shock'

Newspapers have been offering readers their own recollections of the reaction to Sputnik's launch.

One of the leading dailies, Izvestia, recalls on its front page that the West was "in shock" after learning of "this great achievement".

"Banner headlines in the world's newspapers were full of admiration, or perhaps fear, at our country's newly discovered might," the paper says.

The business daily Vedomosti features an article by Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet leader at the time of the launch.

Sergei remembers that he was in the company of his father when the news came through. "At around midnight, the door opened and a secretary said there was a call for him," he recalls. "My father returned to the table smiling - the launch had been successful."

And yet, Sergei points out: "Ten years later the Soviet Union was beaten by the United States in the race to the moon."

But for some papers, nothing can overshadow the memories of the day Sputnik went into space.

Pravda, once one of the iconic brands of the Soviet era but now with a far smaller readership, plasters the headline "A Soviet breakthrough" across its front page.

"Now reports of the USSR's launch of the world's first man-made satellite are delivered calmly," the paper observes.

"But at the time, half a century ago, those words rang out and rolled with the thunder of a great Victory."

BBC Monitoring selects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaux abroad.