In a story dating to the late sixties, one of my older brothers when he was of a single-digit age, asked my mother if the Moon was a planet. She replied, "No, it's a satellite." He looked a little surprised and then asked, "Really? Who launched it."
The funny (or maybe "strange") thing is that when I repeated this story to my girlfriend back in the late 80s, she that it was silly to refer to the Moon as a "satellite". She asked her younger sister to define what a satellite was, and apparently she didn't know that the Moon was a satellite. Sigh. Hello?? This story took place when there were more *natural* satellites in our Solar system than mad-made ones. The definition has kind of changed.
TS
(And this is coming from a guy who had a problem with rationalizing the term "satellite nations" when I first learned about the Soviet Union in 6th grade.)
After Sputnik was launched, there was a joke about Czechoslovakia launching its own satellite... which would circle around Sputnik.