NASA History Office release:
Rockets and People: Hot Days of the Cold War (Volume III)
by Boris Chertok
Dr. Asif Siddiqi, Series Editor
(Washington, D.C.: NASA SP-2009-4110), pp. 796 + xxiii, hardcover.
Much has been written in the West on the history of the Soviet space
program but few Westerners have read direct first-hand accounts of the
men and women who were behind the many Russian accomplishments in
exploring space. The memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, who worked
under the legendary Sergey Korolev, translated from the original
Russian, fill that gap. In Volume 1 of Rockets and People, Chertok
described his early life as an aeronautical engineer and his
adventures as a member of the Soviet team that searched postwar,
occupied Germany for the remnants of the Nazi rocket program. Volume 2
takes up the story with the development of the world’s first
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and ends with the launch of
Sputnik and the early moon probes.
In Volume 3, Chertok recollects the great successes of, and continues
the fascinating narrative of the Soviet space program in the 1960s,
arguably the peak of the effort. Chertok devotes a significant portion
of the volume to the early years of Soviet human spaceflight from 1961
to 1967, including the launch of the world’s first space voyager Yuri
Gagarin and gripping accounts of two of the most tragic episodes of
the Soviet space program, the death of Korolev and the flight and
death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov during the very first piloted
Soyuz flight in 1967. Furthermore, Chertok provides a radically unique
perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the point of view of
those who would have been responsible for unleashing nuclear
Armageddon in 1962 had Kennedy and Khrushchev not been able to agree
on a stalemate. He concludes focusing on the relationship between the
space program and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which would serve as
great interest to historians of Soviet science.
How to order: Please contact the NASA Center for AeroSpace
Information, 7121 Standard Drive Hanover, MD 21076, 301-621-0390, help at sti.nasa.gov
, Online Order Form. The price code is EA5 (Within U.S. $25.00 plus
$2.00 shipping and handling: Outside U.S. $50.00 plus $17.00 S&H).
This book also may be purchased from the NASA Information Center, NASA
Headquarters, 300 E Street SW, Room 1H23, Washington, DC 20546-0001,
202-358-0000 or the Government Printing Office (866-512-1800 or ContactCenter at gpo.gov).
