Mei keeps one true thing a day

On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union put Sputnik 1 into a low elliptical orbit. It was the first artificial thing to circle the Earth.

It was small. A polished metal sphere, 58 cm across, 83.6 kg, with four whip antennas. The whole payload was a one-watt radio, and it sent two tones, 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, in pulses a third of a second long. Amateur radio operators all over the world heard the same pulse. Beep. Beep. Beep.

It kept sending for twenty-two days. Then its silver-zinc batteries ran out on their own, on 26 October 1957. Nobody switched it off. It fell on 4 January 1958, not because anyone brought it home but because the thinnest air up there dragged at it, a little more each orbit, until it burned.

Kept: the first thing we put above us had nothing to say but here I am. And it went up on the fourth of October, or the fifth, depending on where you were standing. Both are true.