Question: Was sputnik the launch of the Space Race
About the article "Cold War", section "Sino-Soviet split, space race, ICBMs".

Candidate passages:
 Russia celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of "Sputnik 1", which marked the start of the Space Race.
(BBCNews)  
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union took the lead in the Space Race with the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957.
"Sputnik" was the first artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth, and the surprise of its successful launch, compounded by the resounding failure of Project Vanguard to launch an American satellite after two attempts, has been dubbed the "Sputnik crisis" and was the impetus for the beginning of the Space Race.
Trying to reclaim lost ground, the United States embarked on a series of new projects and studies, which eventually included the launch of Explorer 1 and the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA. 
The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and uncertainty in the United States in the wake of the success of the Soviet Sputnik program and a perceived technological gap between the two superpowers.
It was a key Cold War event beginning with the launch of "Sputnik 1", the first artificial Earth satellite, by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957.
The Sputnik crisis led to the creation of NASA and the start of the Space Race.
The term was by coined by then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. 
The Sputnik rocket was an unmanned orbital carrier rocket designed by Sergey Korolyov, derived from the R-7 Semyorka ICBM.
On 4 October 1957, it was used to perform the world's first satellite launch, placing "Sputnik 1" into a low Earth orbit.
Two versions of the Sputnik were built, the Sputnik-PS (GRAU index 8K71PS), which was used to launch "Sputnik 1" and later "Sputnik 2", and the Sputnik (8A91), which failed to launch a satellite in April 1958, and subsequently launched "Sputnik 3" on 15 May 1958.
A later member of the R-7 family, the Polyot, used the same configuration as the Sputnik rocket, but was constructed from Voskhod components.
Because of the similarity, the Polyot was sometimes known as the Sputnik 11A59. 
Sputnik 41 (, ), also known as Sputnik Jr 2 and Radio Sputnik 18 (RS-18), was a Franco-Russian amateur radio satellite which was launched in 1998 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Aéro-Club de France, and the forty-first anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite.
A one-third scale model of Sputnik 1, Sputnik 41 was deployed from the Mir space station on 10 November 1998.
Sputnik 41 was launched aboard Progress M-40 at 04:14 UTC on 25 October 1998, along with supplies for Mir and the Znamya-2.5 reflector experiment.
A Soyuz-U carrier rocket placed the spacecraft into orbit, flying from Site 1/5 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan: the same launch pad used by Sputnik 1.
Progress M-40 docked to Mir on 27 October, and the satellite was transferred to the space station.
At about 19:30 UTC on 10 November, during an extra-vehicular activity, Sputnik 41 was deployed by cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Avdeyev.
On 24 November, a fortnight after deployment, Sputnik 41 was in a low Earth orbit with a perigee of , an apogee of , an inclination of 51.6 degrees, and a period of 91.44 minutes.
The satellite was given the International Designator 1998-062C, and was catalogued by the United States Space Command as 25533.
Having ceased operations on 11 December 1998 after its batteries expired, Sputnik 41 decayed from orbit on 11 January 1999.
Sputnik 41 was originally intended to be built aboard Mir, based around a satellite launched in October 1997 as a backup for Sputnik 40.
That spacecraft had been stored aboard the space station for a year after the successful deployment of Sputnik 40, and it was intended that it would be fitted with upgraded electronics and deployed.
By the time of launch, the project had grown to involve a complete satellite, and the Sputnik 40 backup was never deployed.