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 and propelled the USSR from backward state to superpower and pioneer of the Space Age. This is the pulse-racing story of a time when two nations and ideologies were pitted against each other in a quest that laid the foundations of the modern technological world.