from Sputnik: The Shock of the Century by Paul Dickson

Of the many bits of speculation as to the next Russian move, none was quite so dramatic as that of John Rinehart of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts: “I would not be surprised,” he said, “if the Russians reached the moon within a week.” Feeding the fear was the fact that nobody really knew what Sputnik was doing up there or at first even what it looked like… Even Sputnik’s simple beep bought confusion… The CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Army, Air Force, and other Western intelligence worked around the clock to see who would be the first to decipher the beeps. The assumption had been that important data were coming back from space. Some went out on a limb. Columnist Stewart Alsop suggested on October 13 that the Soviets had actually put a reconnaissance satellite in orbit. “There is a mounting body of evidence, taken most seriously in the Washington intelligence community, that the Soviet satellite is not blind,” he wrote, “that Sputnik has eyes to see.” Finally, one of the Russian IGY delegates in Washington revealed that there was no code and the satellite could not see. The one-watt, battery-operated transmitter was placed inside the aluminum shell simply so that it could be tracked.