Khrushchev's son: Soviets won race

A celebrated American astronaut and the son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agree the launch of the first man-made satellite 50 years ago this week was an influential event in both their lives.

But when Jim Lovell and Sergei Khrushchev met Thursday in Chicago to mark the anniversary of that event, they diverged on the question of which country won the space race launched by Sputnik I.

The 73-year-old Khrushchev put it in terms of a game score.

"The Soviets won 3 to 1," he told The Associated Press. "The Soviets launched the first Sputnik, the first man in space, the first manned space station. … Americans have one victory: The man on the moon."

Khrushchev, now an American citizen and a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, was at Chicago's Adler Planetarium on Thursday, 50 years to the day that the shiny, basketball-sized orbital launched.

One of the people who greeted Khrushchev was Lovell, whose leadership of the Apollo 13 mission was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie of the same name.

In a separate interview Thursday, with Khrushchev standing nearby, the 79-year-old Lovell took issue with the notion of a Soviet space-race win.

"Well, I kind of think that, eventually, we came out on top," Lovell said. "If you say landing on the moon is the finish line, we did (win). The Russians tried very desperately to land on the moon … but failed."

Both men say Oct. 4, 1957 -- the day the U.S.-Soviet race began in earnest with Sputnik's launch -- remains fresh in their minds.

Sergei Khrushchev and his father Nikita were staying at a Czarist-era palace in the western part of the Soviet Union when they got a call from a space official saying Sputnik was circling the globe.

"My father had a smile on his face. He was very proud. We were all very proud," said Khrushchev, who, with his round head and thinning hair looks strikingly similar to his father.

A few hours later, they huddled excitedly around a radio to hear the satellite transmitting steady beeping sounds as it went by miles above them.

Later that day, thousands of miles away in Milwaukee, young naval officer Lovell stepped outside as news broke of the successful Soviet launch. In amazement, he looked toward the sky to see Sputnik's spent rocket booster -- lit by the late-evening sun -- that also orbited the globe.

For Lovell and other Americans, word that the Soviets had beaten the Americans into space came as a shock.

"I kept saying, 'We got all these supposedly technical people, how come the Russians could suddenly put a satellite in an orbit and we can't do that?' " Lovell recalled.

Lovell said he's convinced the U.S. could have put a satellite into space two years before the Soviets using military rocket technology. But he said President Eisenhower at the time did not want to employ military hardware for that task.

As it was, the United States put its first satellite in space four months after Sputnik. Eleven years later, the Americans landed on the moon.

"It bothered my father that the U.S. got to the moon first," Khrushchev said. "He intended to go to the moon, but he didn't want to pay for it. Putting money in Soviet agriculture and housing was a bigger priority."

Both Lovell and Khrushchev were quick to say that Sputnik and the Cold War space race changed their lives forever.

Sputnik, which spent about three months in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere, inspired Khrushchev to pursue his studies in science; in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, he worked in the Soviet space and missile programs.

Lovell readily credits Sputnik for inspiring him and the whole country to push harder for successes in space.

"If it wasn't for Sputnik, we never would have gone to the moon when we did," he said.