The Space Race from Sputnik to Starlink

The Sky Is a Commons

October 5, 2026 at 08:17 AMAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

The First Beep in the Sky: The Class of the Space Race from Sputnik to Starlink

On 4 October 1957, an 83.6-kilogram sphere, launched by a country whose literacy rate had once been around thirty percent, became the first artificial celestial body humanity produced. Sixty-nine years later the sky is again the stage of a race. But this time it is not only states that are racing; companies are there too. This piece is on whom the sky has belonged to, from that first "beep" to today.

Dear Young Comrades,

First a short summary, then a long story.

The summary is this: On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union put Sputnik 1 into orbit. This was the first artificial satellite in human history, and it set off a panic in the United States that was called the "Sputnik shock". Then a race began that lasted twelve years: the first living being (Laika, 1957), the first human (Gagarin, 1961), the first woman (Tereshkova, 1963), the first spacewalk (Leonov, 1965) came from the Soviets; the first to set foot on the Moon (Apollo 11, 1969) came from the United States. The race was a shop window in which two different social orders displayed their own productive forces, and it was also an arms race walking in the shadow of intercontinental missiles.

Today the race has heated up again. This year, in April, Artemis II took four astronauts around the Moon and brought them back; China sent Chang'e 7 to the Moon's south pole in August and aims to land a human on the Moon before 2030; India, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and Turkey are on the stage too. But the real novelty is here: of the 325 orbital launches made in the world in 2025, a single private company, SpaceX, carried out half, and that year it carried 85 percent of the satellites sent into space (BryceTech data, Satellite Today). More than half of states' space spending is now military too: 73.5 billion of 137.4 billion dollars in 2025 (Novaspace).

That is, in 1957 the sky was the racing ground of two states and two systems; in 2026 it is turning into a field of enclosure for monopolies, a front for armies.

In this piece we will first tell that first race from the beginning; then we will get to know the actors of today's race one by one; and at the end we will ask the sky the three questions we always ask: In whose hands? Under whose control? For whose benefit?

You can read this piece as the continuation of "To Look Far Is to Look Into the Past", which we wrote a month ago on the occasion of the Roman Telescope. There we talked about the budget of science and the property of knowledge; here we will talk about the property of the sky.

The sound of a sphere: 4 October 1957

That night, on the Kazakh steppe, an R-7 rocket lifted off from a secret launch site near Tyuratam (today's Baikonur). In its nose there was a sphere 58 centimetres across, of polished aluminium alloy, and four long antennae attached to it. The sphere circled the Earth about once every 96 minutes, and it broadcast an uninterrupted "beep... beep..." signal on two frequencies.

That signal could be picked up by amateur radio operators everywhere in the world. This was a conscious choice: the only "scientific" work Sputnik did was to announce its existence to everyone. Its batteries ran out 21 days later; after the sphere had made about 1,400 turns over three months, it entered the atmosphere on 4 January 1958 and burned.

Technically it was a simple instrument. But politically it was an earthquake. Why?

Because the rocket was a missile

The R-7 that carried Sputnik was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. That is, the rocket that could put a sphere in the sky could also carry a nuclear warhead to the other side of the ocean. The core of the panic in the United States was this: "If they can put a ball in the sky, they can put a bomb on Washington too."

We say this detail at the start of the piece, because the whole story of the space race is the story of this double nature: humanity's greatest curiosity and its greatest capacity for destruction were born inside the same rocket. This is the first form, in space, of the law we told in the Roman piece as "the best optics go first to espionage".

But it was not only a missile either

Sputnik's real shock effect was historical more than it was military. A country whose great majority in 1917 was peasant, whose literacy rate was low, whose industry was far behind Western Europe's; a country that had passed through civil war, through hunger, and through a world war in which it lost 27 million of its people, and that had begun only twelve years earlier to clear its ruins, had left the world's richest capitalist country behind in the sky.

How was this possible? Here we have to make a Marxist reading, but without exaggeration and without romanticism.

Why did Sputnik lift off from Moscow?

The planned economy could gather resources

The Soviet economy could gather the social surplus at a centre and direct it to prioritised fields. It could pile tens of thousands of engineers and workers into a field that had no expectation of profit, and that might not bear fruit even twenty years later: rocket science. In a capitalist economy this work could be done only by the state stepping outside the market on the ground of "military need"; indeed the United States, after Sputnik, did exactly this.

Mass education raised a generation

The literacy campaign of the 1920s, the technical schools and the workers' faculties (rabfak) of the 1930s, carried the children of peasants and workers into engineering. The most striking proof of this is the first two humans who went into space:

Yuri Gagarin was the son of a kolkhoz carpenter and a milker. He began the trade as a foundry apprentice at the vocational school of a steel factory, he went to evening school, and he became a pilot at a flying club.
Valentina Tereshkova was a weaving worker in a textile factory. The jumps she made at the factory's parachute club took her to candidacy as a cosmonaut.

Set these two biographies beside the fact that nearly all of the Apollo astronauts were military test pilots, and that the great majority of them came from middle-class families. The Soviet space programme, because it sent a foundry apprentice and a weaving worker into the sky, was not only a technical victory; it was a class message: "The sky can belong to the worker too."

"Neither saint nor villain": the other face of the medal

But we cannot tell this story like a fairy tale. The principle we always tell the young comrades holds here too: we read history neither as saint nor as villain.

Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space programme, was arrested in 1938 on a fabricated charge, lost his teeth in a gold-mine camp in Kolyma, and then worked in a closed design bureau (a sharashka) where convict engineers were put to work. The "Chief Designer" of Sputnik, of Gagarin, of Vostok was not even introduced to the public by name until 1966, the year he died.
Failures were hidden. In 1960 a missile exploded on the pad at Baikonur, and by the official numbers 78 people died, by other estimates more (the Nedelin disaster); the world learned this thirty years later.
Inside the programme there was a bureaucratic competition among design bureaus (Korolev, Chelomei, Glushko), and this led to the splitting of resources. This was one of the important reasons the Soviets lost the Moon race.

These facts do not shrink Sputnik's meaning; on the contrary, they make it more understandable. The power of planning and bureaucratic blockage, the enormous talent that mass education created and the repression that silenced that talent, stood side by side inside the same society. To see this is not the weak point of defending socialism; it is its mature form.

The Sputnik shock: what did America do?

Sputnik's effect in the United States was a mirror that shook a country's view of itself. The press wrote "a technological Pearl Harbor". A month later, on 3 November 1957, Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika into space. The United States' answer was the Vanguard attempt, broadcast live on television in December 1957: the rocket rose about a metre from the pad and exploded. The newspapers called it "Flopnik".

The United States could put its first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit only on 31 January 1958. The institutional transformation that followed is Sputnik's real historical legacy:

What was founded in the US after Sputnik	What did it serve?
ARPA (February 1958, today's DARPA)	A military research agency. ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet, came out of here.
NASA (October 1958)	A civilian space agency; but the lion's share of its contracts went to private defence companies.
The National Defense Education Act (1958)	Enormous public funds for science and mathematics education, student grants.
An explosion in the public R&D budget	NASA's share rose in 1966 to about 4.4 percent of the federal budget (today it is around 4 per thousand).

There is a very instructive contradiction here, young comrades. The world's largest capitalist country, in order to be able to answer a socialist country's success, suspended its own market principles: it transferred billions, by the hand of the state, to education, to research and to industry. The order that says "the state should not interfere in the economy" made the largest state investment when its rival frightened it. And the outputs of this investment, from the internet to the microchip, became a source of profit for private monopolies in the decades that followed.

Von Braun's shadow

Another truth of the US programme is generally squeezed into a footnote in the history books. At the head of the team that designed Explorer 1, and then the Saturn V that went to the Moon, was Wernher von Braun: a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, the architect of Hitler's V-2 missile. The V-2s were produced by captive workers in the tunnels of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp; the number of captives who died in this production is greater than the number of people the missile killed in the war. After the war, von Braun and his team were brought to the United States by "Operation Paperclip", their pasts cleaned.

This detail shows on what foundations the "free world's" victory on the Moon was built: capitalism takes over the knowledge that serves it, without looking at whose blood it was produced with.

The chronology of the race: who did what first?

Let us give the young comrades the milestones of the race together:

Year	The first	Who?
1957	The first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1)	USSR
1957	The first living being in orbit (Laika)	USSR
1959	The first craft to reach the Moon (Luna 2); the first photographs of the Moon's far side (Luna 3)	USSR
1961	The first human in space (Yuri Gagarin, 108 minutes)	USSR
1962	The first intercontinental live broadcast by a communications satellite (Telstar)	US
1963	The first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)	USSR
1965	The first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov)	USSR
1966	The first soft landing on the Moon (Luna 9)	USSR
1968	The first humans to circle the Moon (Apollo 8)	US
1969	The first crewed landing on the Moon (Apollo 11)	US
1970	Bringing a sample from the Moon by robot (Luna 16); the first rover on the Moon (Lunokhod 1); the first landing on another planet (Venera 7, Venus)	USSR
1971	The first space station (Salyut 1)	USSR
1975	The first joint flight (the Apollo–Soyuz docking)	USSR + US

The table shows that almost the whole of the first ten years passed in Soviet superiority, and that the United States, with an enormous mobilisation of resources, pulled ahead on the Moon. The Apollo programme cost about 25 billion dollars in the money of the day, a cost exceeding 250 billion dollars in today's money, and at its most intense it employed 400,000 people.

Who won the Moon, really?

The Soviets could not land a human on the Moon. Korolev's death in 1966, the dividedness of the bureaus, and the giant N1 rocket's failing in all four attempts were the main reasons for this. But the Soviet programme turned in another direction: to long-duration space stations. The Salyuts, then Mir (1986–2001), showed that a human could live in space for months. This accumulation is in the design of the International Space Station today; after the Shuttle was retired in 2011, for nine years the only craft that could carry humans to the station was the Soviet-designed Soyuz.

That is, the question "who won the race" is in fact a wrong question. The truer question is this: What did the race leave to humanity, and into whose hands did this accumulation pass?

Those who stayed on the ground while going to the Moon

On the morning of 16 July 1969, as Apollo 11 was launched, there was a group of people at the entrance of the launch site in Florida. Ralph Abernathy, who after Martin Luther King's death was carrying on the Poor People's Campaign, had come there with poor Black families and with mule carts. What he said was plain: we are not against going to the Moon; but it is unacceptable that a country that can go to the Moon cannot feed its children.

In the same years the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron voiced the same anger in the song "Whitey on the Moon": a rat bite in Harlem, the bills, the rent; in the sky, the white man's journey to the Moon.

We had talked about this anger in the Roman piece: the anger is just, but its address is not science; it is who controls the products of science and the surplus of society. Abernathy's protest knew this very well: it was the enemy not of the Moon, but of poverty.

The workers of the race

Space history is generally told through astronauts, cosmonauts, and "genius" chief designers. But every rocket is the common labour of thousands of welders, lathe operators, assembly workers, mathematicians doing the calculations, and construction workers. We call this crystallised labour.

Construction soldiers and workers built Baikonur in the middle of the steppe, in extreme heat and cold.
For years, Black women mathematicians working at low wages and under discrimination did NASA's orbital calculations; Katherine Johnson's story reached wide audiences only in the 2010s.
The great majority of Apollo's 400,000 workers were factory workers whose names we have never heard.

The same holds today. At Boeing, which produces the core stage of the SLS, the giant rocket of the Artemis programme, 33,000 machinists struck for weeks in the autumn of 2024. And an investigation Reuters made in 2023 about today's space giant SpaceX revealed that there had been more than 600 work accidents at the company since 2014 that had not been reported to the public: crushings, losses of limbs, burns, and one death (a republication of the Reuters report, Insurance Journal). The report tied the accidents to Musk's pressure to "hurry to Mars".

That those who dream of a colony on Mars do not provide the worker with a safe workshop even on Earth sums up, in a single sentence, the class character of the space race today.

After the Cold War: did the race end?

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the race looked as if it had ended. But what happened was this:

The restoration of capitalism in Russia collapsed the space industry. Engineers could not get their wages, there was a brain drain, and Baikonur became a rented facility on the soil of another state (Kazakhstan). Russia still flies Soyuz today, but the Luna-25 craft it sent to the Moon in 2023 crashed onto the surface. What destroyed the accumulation the Soviets had carried into the sky was not a foreign rival; it was dispossession.
In the United States, space was increasingly privatised. From the 2000s on, NASA became the customer of the sector it had itself built. Today SpaceX carries the astronauts to the station; SpaceX and Blue Origin are building the Moon lander.
Space was openly militarised again. The United States founded the Space Force in 2019. Starshield, the military arm of Starlink, is building a satellite network for the Pentagon. The war in Ukraine showed that a billionaire's satellite network can open and close the communications of a front.

On this ground a new race began.

Today's racers

The United States: Artemis and the private monopolies

The United States' programme of return to the Moon, Artemis, passed a great threshold this year. Artemis II was launched on 1 April 2026; Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and the Canadian Jeremy Hansen circled the Moon and landed in the Pacific on 11 April. The crew, at 406,771 kilometres, passed Apollo 13's record and became the humans who have gone furthest from Earth. Koch became the first woman to circle the Moon, Glover the first Black astronaut, Hansen the first person who is not American.

But the calendar is slipping. In February 2026 NASA reorganised the programme: Artemis III will no longer land on the Moon; in 2027 it will carry out a docking test with the landers in Earth orbit; the landing on the Moon was left to 2028, to Artemis IV. The Gateway station planned for the Moon's orbit was also cancelled in March 2026. The common theme of the press that reported these changes was a single word: China.

China: planned, patient, determined

The Chinese space programme has made a quiet but continuous advance over the last twenty years:

In 2003 it sent its first taikonaut into space.
In 2019 it became the first country to land on the Moon's far side (Chang'e 4).
In 2020 it brought a sample from the Moon, and the same year it sent an orbiter, a lander and a rover to Mars.
In 2022 it completed its own space station, Tiangong.
In 2024 it became the first country to bring a sample from the Moon's far side (Chang'e 6).
On 24 August 2026 it launched Chang'e 7, which will search for water ice at the Moon's south pole.

China aims to land a human on the Moon before 2030. The Long March 10 rocket, the Mengzhou crew capsule and the Lanyue lander are passing their test stages; in May 2026 the crewed and robotic Moon programmes were brought under a single administration.

In reading China's advance we have to avoid two easy paths. The first is to look with the Western press's language of "the China threat". The second is to applaud this automatically as "the victory of socialism". China's space programme, like the Soviets', shows the power of state planning to pile resources onto long-term aims; but this programme is at the same time a part of a great accumulation of capital, of military modernisation, and of a global contest of power. In China too, private rocket companies are growing fast. Our stance is not to choose one of two blocs of capital, but to ask, in both blocs, who controls the sky.

Russia: in the shadow of the inheritance

Russia is still an important actor, with the Soyuz and Progress craft. Together with China it is carrying on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project. But the crash of Luna-25, and the sanctions, show that Russia is having difficulty turning the Soviet inheritance into a new leap.

India: cheap and fast

India, in 2023, with Chandrayaan-3, became the first country to make a soft landing in the region of the Moon's south pole. The cost of the mission was lower than the budget of many Hollywood space films. In 2014 it had reached Mars orbit on the first attempt. Now it is planned that the first uncrewed test flight of the crewed space programme Gaganyaan will be made within 2026, and the crewed flight in 2027 (Starlust). India is also aiming at its own space station.

Japan, Europe, and the others

Japan, in 2024, with the SLIM craft, made a "pinpoint" landing on the Moon with a deviation of a few metres from the target point; the country that, with the Hayabusa missions, brought samples from asteroids.
The European Space Agency flew Ariane 6 in 2024, but it is far behind SpaceX in launch capacity; for this reason the argument over "Europe's space sovereignty" goes on.
The United Arab Emirates, in 2021, placed the Hope probe in Mars orbit; a model that turns oil revenues into prestige and technology transfer.
South Korea is in lunar orbit with the Danuri craft; it developed its own Nuri rocket.
Israel's Beresheet landing attempt in 2019 ended in a crash.

Turkey: knocking on both doors at once

The Turkish Space Agency was founded at the end of 2018. In January 2024 Alper Gezeravcı, on a commercial flight of Axiom Space, became the first Turkish astronaut to go to the International Space Station; in June 2024 Tuva Cihangir Atasever went to the edge of the atmosphere on a Virgin Galactic flight. That is, Turkey's crewed space experience took place by buying tickets from private American companies.

The government's discourse is ambitious: Mehmet Fatih Kacır, the Minister of Industry and Technology, had announced that a craft that will work with a domestic hybrid rocket engine would reach the Moon in the first months of 2027.

But what is really interesting is the diplomatic picture. In April 2024 Turkey applied to join the ILRS, led by China and Russia. Two years later, on 31 August 2026, Minister Kacır signed the Artemis Accords, led by the United States, at NASA headquarters in Washington; Turkey became the 71st signatory (NASA). At the end of September the number of signatories rose to 73.

This is the reflection, in the sky, of the attitude in Turkey's foreign policy of "knocking on both doors at once". But for the young comrades the real question is this: Whose is the budget of this programme, whose is the decision, and whose work will the technology it produces serve? In Turkey, space and aviation are developing intertwined with the defence industry; the discourse of "domestic and national" is becoming the instrument of the transfer of public resources to a few large defence companies, and of a shop window of nationalist pride. Every "we are going to the Moon" announcement made without discussing a scientific programme, a transparent budget, open data-sharing with the universities, and the right of the engineers who work in this sector to organise, is on the path not of Sputnik, but of Flopnik.

Between 1957 and 2026: what did the race change?

The race of 1957	The race of 2026
Two states, two social systems, were racing.	States, monopolies and billionaires are racing.
All of the launches were the state's.	Half of the launches are a single private company's.
The aim: prestige, science, and missile superiority.	The aim: the satellite market, lunar resources, military superiority.
The sky was defined as "the province of all mankind" (the 1967 Outer Space Treaty).	In 2015 the United States recognised the right of private companies to own the resources they extract in space; a race to seize "rights" on the Moon began.
The number of satellites was measured in tens.	A single company's number of satellites is approaching 10,000.
A foundry apprentice and a weaving worker went into space.	Those who go into space most often are billionaires and the customers who can buy their tickets.
The product of science was a state secret, but it was public.	The product of science is a company secret, and patented; public money, private profit.
Fear of the rival forced the US to invest in education.	Fear of the rival today brings investment mostly in weapons and in subsidy.

The core of the table is this: In 1957 the race, because of the existence of a socialist alternative, was forcing even capitalism into public investment. In 2026 that alternative does not exist, and the race is turning into a race to enclose the sky.

The enclosure of the sky

One of the concepts we dwell on most, as Knowledge Commons, is enclosure: the turning into private property of what is open to common use. In England, the closing of the peasants' common pastures with fences was the birth pang of capitalism. In the digital age we talk about the enclosure of knowledge and of data. In space this process is being lived in three forms:

The enclosure of orbits: Low Earth orbit is a limited space. Private constellations made up of tens of thousands of satellites are occupying this space in effect; the risk of collision and space debris narrow the access of everyone who comes later, of poor countries, and of scientists.
The enclosure of the night sky: Satellite trails are spoiling astronomical observations, and radio-astronomy bands are being polluted. The starry sky, which for thousands of years has been humanity's common heritage, is turning into a company's commercial infrastructure. We had told this in the Roman piece as "capitalism has found the last field it can enclose: what is above our heads".
The enclosure of celestial bodies: The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that no state can appropriate celestial bodies. But the United States' 2015 law, and the Artemis Accords, are stretching this principle in favour of companies under the name of "resource extraction". The race for the water-ice regions at the Moon's south pole is a race over whose a limited resource will be.

The ideological cover of these processes is ready too: "making humanity a multi-planetary species", "a backup civilisation on Mars", "longtermism". We had discussed in detail, in the piece "From Futurism to Techno-Fascism", what kind of political programme these fictions carry. The owners of the order that is making the Earth unliveable are reserving the escape ticket for themselves too.

What do we learn from Sputnik to today?

The first: science is not of itself either progressive or reactionary; we look at who directs it. The same rocket can carry both Gagarin and a nuclear warhead. The same satellite network can both bring the internet to the school in the village and black out a front.

The second: great scientific leaps have been possible by social planning, outside the expectation of profit. Neither Sputnik nor Apollo was a product of the market. One was the product of socialist planning, the other of the capitalist state's suspending the market. The myth that "the private sector is more efficient" is the myth of the monopolies that sit on top of the infrastructure the public built over sixty years.

The third: the existence of an alternative changes its rival too. Sputnik forced the United States to invest in education and in public research. The absence of a socialist alternative, today, is leaving capitalism unbridled. For this reason, building an alternative is a need not only "for us", but for the whole of humanity.

The fourth: the sky is a commons. It belongs to everyone who looks at it. Orbits, the night sky, the Moon's water, should be protected as humanity's common heritage; they should not turn into the property of a few companies and a few armies.

Concrete tasks for the young comrades

Look at the sky. If there is an astronomy association, a university observatory, or an amateur astronomy collective in the city you are in, join it. With a satellite-tracking application, count how many Starlink satellites pass this evening. Seeing the enclosure of the night sky with your own eye is the best lesson.
Read the history of science with its class. Read Sputnik and Apollo not only as a list of "who was first", but with the questions of by whose labour, with whose money, for whose benefit. See Gagarin's foundry apprenticeship, Katherine Johnson's calculations, the tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora, and SpaceX's accident records as parts of the same story.
Approach Turkey's space programme with a demand for transparency. How much is the budget, which companies does it go to, is the data produced open, is it shared with the universities? Asking these questions is not opposing "national pride"; it is asking the account of a public resource.
Those who work, or who will work, in the aviation and space sector: This sector is growing fast, and a large part of it is intertwined with the defence industry. Put on the agenda the right of engineers, technicians and workers to organise, work safety, and the right of conscientious objection. The principles of organisation we told in The Computing Worker's Handbook hold for this sector too.
Defend open data and open science. The open data archives of NASA, of ESA, and of the other public agencies are commons that everyone can reach. Use them, teach them, spread them.
Raise your voice against the militarisation of space. The spirit of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty is the peaceful use of space. Be a part of the international peace movement against the arming of space, against anti-satellite tests, and against military constellations.

The message of the first beep

There was no encrypted information inside the signal Sputnik broadcast. There was only a sound: "I am here." But that sound was saying something, to people all over the world, that they could listen to with their own radios: Humanity has passed the limits of its own planet. And those who did this were the children of people who, forty years earlier, had been ploughing the soil.

Sixty-nine years later the sky is crowded. But inside that crowd there is no subject called "humanity"; there are companies, armies and flags. Our task is to make valid again what that first signal said: the sky belongs not to a few billionaires, but to everyone who looks at it. The knowledge of going into space is not the accumulation of a few monopolies, but the common accumulation of the millions of labourers who created it.

If a foundry apprentice could go to the stars, it is possible too for the workers to make again the road that goes to the stars.

The machine is new, the chain is old. The sky is new, the fence is old. But the commons is older than both.

In solidarity

Sources

Related pieces on the site

To Look Far Is to Look Into the Past (1 September 2026)
From Futurism to Techno-Fascism (7 September 2026)
The Revolt of Crystallized Labor: A Call to the 20th Karaburun Science Congress
The Computing Worker's Handbook (2 September 2026)

Historical sources

NASA History Office, Sputnik and the Origins of the Space Age
Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974, NASA History Division, 2000
Walter A. McDougall, ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Basic Books, 1985
Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Knopf, 2007

Current figures

Tags:#space #ussr #russia #usa #nasa#satellite#earth#universe #science #history