In this, the fourth and final volume of his memoirs, Boris Chertok concludes his monumental trek through a nearly 100-year life. As with the previous English-language volumes, the text has been significantly modified and extended over the original Russian versions published in the 1990s. The first volume covered his childhood, early career, and transformation into a missile engineer by the end of World War II. In the second volume, he took the story up through the birth of the postwar Soviet ballistic-missile program and then the launch of the world s artificial satellite, Sputnik. This was followed, in the third volume, by a description of the early and spectacular successes of the Soviet space program in the 1960s, including such unprecedented achievements as the flight of cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin. The fourth volume concludes his memoirs on the history of the Soviet space program with a lengthy meditation on the failed Soviet human lunar program and then brings the story to a close with the events of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the summer of 1989, Soviet censors finally allowed journalists to write about an episode of Soviet history that had officially never happened: the massive Soviet effort to compete with Apollo in the 1960s to land a human being on the Moon. U.S. President John F. Kennedy had laid down the gauntlet in a speech in May 1961 to recover some of the self-confidence lost by the series of Soviet successes in space in the wake of Sputnik. Kennedy's challenge was embodied in an enormous investment in human spaceflight in the 1960s and culminated in the landing of NASA astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Buzz Aldrin, Jr., on the surface of the Moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission. Although a number of Western analysts and observers (not to mention U.S. intelligence analysts) suspected that the Soviets had been in the race to the Moon, Soviet spokespersons officially disallowed or rejected the notion that they had tried to preempt the Americans. This facade eventually cracked at the height of glasmost (openness) in the late 1980s. In the summer of 1989, Soviet censors permitted the publication of a number of articles and books that admitted the existence of a human lunar program in the 1960s. As more and more information emerged in the early 1990s, some salient features began to emerge: that the program had been massive, that it had involved the development of a super booster known as the N-1, that all efforts to beat the Americans had failed, and that evidence of the program had been whitewashed out of existence.
Rockets and People, Volume 4
2011
710 pages
Report
No indication
English
NTIS | 2005
|NTIS | 2009
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|SLUB | 2009
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