On 4 October 1957, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union secretly launched Sputnik, Earth`s first artificial moon. Powered by a car battery, it passed over the stunned American continent once every 101 minutes & propelled the USSR from backward state to superpower & pioneer of the Space Age. This is the pulse-racing story of a time when two nations & ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world.