SOVIET SATELLITE SENDS U.S. INTO A TIZZY

An eerie, intermittent croak — it sounded like a cricket with a cold — was picked up by radio receivers around the world last week.

It came from beyond the stratosphere and signaled an epochal breakthrough into the new age of space exploration. It was being emitted - to the delight of Communists and chagrin of U.S. military men - by a Soviet device which had been shot from the earth as a manmade moon, the first official satellite in history.

The Russians had hurled a 23-inch metal sphere into an orbit around the earth some 560 miles up, and at a speed of 18,000 mph it was completing one circuit every hour and 36 minutes. It weighed 184 pounds, eight times as much as the Vanguard satellite the U.S. is still struggling to launch. Inside it were batteries and a radio transmitter broadcasting on 20 and 40 megacycles.

Within hours radio operators in the U.S., Japan, Canada and Great Britain began to pick up the satellite's telltale sounds on prescribed frequencies. Although 76 groups of amateur U.S. "moonwatchers" rushed to their posts last Saturday before dawn, they failed to make any sure sightings. This was explained when scientists computed the satellite's apparent orbit from its radio signals. The satellite, while regularly crossing all parts of the earth north of Cape Horn and south of Nome, Alaska, will not be above the U.S. at dawn or dusk until late October - and at no other time of day, thanks to the blotting-out effect of the sun, can it be seen anywhere.

For the Russians the launching was both a propaganda and a scientific victory. Variations in the signals indicated that the satellite was sending data about the upper air which only the Russians could decipher. And, ominously, the launching seemed to prove that Russia's intercontinental ballistic missile is a perfected machine, since it would take such a rocket to launch the satellite.

U.S. rocket men were stunned. All week they had been attending a satellite symposium in Washington along with Russian scientists who had given no hint of the impending launching. They gamely congratulated the jubilant Russians but privately criticized them for not facilitating the tracking of their moon. And they could not deny the assertion of one Muscovite that "Americans design better automobile tailfins but we design the best intercontinental ballistic missiles and earth satellites."