1957: Sputnik 2 launches

On 3 November 1957, just one month after the shock of Sputnik 1, the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 2 into orbit. Aboard the satellite was Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow and the first living creature to enter Earth orbit. Although Laika did not survive, the mission showcased the Soviet Union’s rapidly maturing rocketry and electronics.

The successive Sputnik launches stunned the American public and its leaders. Anxiety that the United States was losing the scientific and technological race produced swift political action. In February 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, inside the Department of Defense. ARPA’s charge was to make certain that America would never again be surprised by an adversary’s technical advance.

Within a few years ARPA turned toward computing. In 1962 it founded the Information Processing Techniques Office and placed the visionary psychologist J. C. R. Licklider in charge. Licklider imagined computers as symbiotic partners in human thought rather than mere calculating engines. He channelled generous contracts to university groups exploring interactive computing and the brand-new field then being named “artificial intelligence.”

Those contracts underwrote the first dedicated AI laboratories. At MIT, Project MAC investigated time-sharing systems and produced pioneering programs in natural language and automated planning. Parallel support reached Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, where researchers constructed theorem provers, game-playing programs and early mobile robots. Many of the core ideas still used in AI—heuristic search, knowledge representation, learning from experience—were incubated inside this ARPA-funded ecosystem of the 1960s.

Renamed DARPA, the agency continues to underwrite ambitious AI research today, from robust autonomous systems to new machine-learning architectures. The faint radio beep of Sputnik 2 crossing the sky on 3 November 1957 therefore marks more than a milestone in the Space Race; it marks the moment when geopolitical urgency began to bankroll the intellectual adventure that has become modern artificial intelligence.