Yes!
2007 is going to be the 50th anniversary of Sputnik and what historians say was the start of the "Space Age".
October/04/2007 is only 277 days away, and surely there will be threads on HZ commemorating that
anniversary on that day and week....I look forward to it.

But it's doubtful that there are more than three people who log in here at HZ who are old enough to remember
the announcement and or the alleged sightings of Sputnik 1.
Jim Oberg is one person who probably can remember the Sputnik 1 event firsthand;
Bowser is another...And there is one more person on HZ who can remember the event.

I am not one of them; I was only a little over a year old at the time.

Incidently, those people who have claimed to have seen Sputnik 1 in orbit with their own "naked eyes"
are probably incorrect. The Sputnik 1 sphere was shiny admittedly, but it was probably no brighter than
Magnitude 5 - 6; the limit of visibility to the naked eye.....
What they most likely saw was the obviously larger empty upper-stage of the
R7 rocket booster that carried the Sputnik into orbit.

Another myth about the Sputnik 1 event is is that nothing has survived of that Sputnik or its carrier rocket.
Wrong!...The Strap-on boosters of the Sputnik's R7 rocketbooster should have survived the plunge back to earth, smashing into the Kazakh desert where they may have been recovered by Soviet offiicials. What happened to those badly-mangled
strap-on boosters?..... Maybe Jim Oberg knows.

Cheers...... And Happy New Year.

Jacob