"Beep-beep" and the USSR cheating.
Heh, heh. I was a Senior in HS in a college town when Sputnik took off. The American rationalizations were that all it did was go "beep-beep" and that the evil bastards sent it up with a MILITARY rocket. That was regarded as cheating, by some.
The truth was that Eisenhower did want to send up the first satellite on a civilian rocket, the Vanguard as I recall, and the US could have done it earlier had we relied upon military hardware. And while the first US satellite was more complex, it wasn't the first.
Arf