Sputnik launched

October 4, 1957

THIS day, the Soviet Union inaugurates the ‘Space Age’ with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for ‘satellite,’ was launched from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic.

Travelling at 18,000 miles an hour Sputnik circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. In January 1958, Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere. n

Apple founder Steve Jobs dies

October 5, 2011

ON this day, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc., who revolutionised the computer, music and mobile communications industries with devices like the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad, dies at age 56. Jobs could intuit what customers wanted before they knew it themselves. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs “was the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.”