On 6 December 1957, American television viewers watched a Navy Vanguard rocket rise about a meter off its launch pad, lose thrust, topple, and explode. The Soviet Union had launched Sputnik less than ten weeks earlier; the live failure of Vanguard, followed on 31 January 1958 by the Army’s successful Explorer 1, opened the largest sustained mobilization of federal resources for science and security in U.S. peacetime history.
The first technical response was on November 8, 1957, when the Army was authorized to use a Jupiter-C derivative to attempt a satellite launch. The Navy’s public Vanguard program failed on live television on December 6, 1957. The Army’s Explorer 1 launched successfully on January 31, 1958, with James Van Allen’s instrument package, which discovered the Van Allen radiation belts.
The three most consequential reforms were the National Defense Education Act (signed September 2, 1958), which funded the first generation of post-Sputnik scientists; ARPA (February 7, 1958), which seeded the computer science research that produced ARPANET and time-sharing; and NASA (signed July 29, 1958), which absorbed the NACA and most of the civilian space effort with a $117 million first-year budget. The ICBM programs (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman) were accelerated; the United States had more than 200 operational ICBMs by 1962 and more than 900 by 1965, a structural advantage the Soviets did not match.
For the rest of the Sputnik article and the space race overview.