- Cadbury, Deborah.
Space Race.
London: Harper Perennial, 2005.
ISBN 0-00-720994-0.
-
This is an utterly compelling history of the early years
of the space race, told largely through the parallel
lives of mirror-image principals Sergei Korolev
(anonymous Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, and
beforehand slave labourer in Stalin's Gulag) and Wernher
von Braun, celebrity driving force behind the U.S.
push into space, previously a Nazi party member, SS officer,
and user of slave labour to construct his A-4/V-2 weapons.
Drawing upon material not declassified by the United States
until the 1980s and revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the early years of these prime movers of space exploration are
illuminated, along with how they were both exploited by and deftly
manipulated their respective governments. I have never seen the story
of the end-game between the British, Americans, and Soviets to spirit
the V-2 hardware, technology, and team from Germany in the immediate
post-surrender chaos told so well in a popular book. The
extraordinary difficulties of trying to get things done in the Soviet
command economy are also described superbly, and underline how
inspired and indefatigable Korolev must have been to accomplish what
he did.
Although the book covers the 1930s through the 1969 Moon
landing, the main focus is on the competition between the
U.S. and the Soviet Union between the end of World War II
and the mid-1960s. Out of 345 pages of main text, the first 254
are devoted to the period ending with the flights of Yuri
Gagarin and Alan Shepard in 1961. But then, that makes sense,
given what we now know about the space race (and you'll know,
if you don't already, after reading this book). Although
nobody in the West knew at the time, the space race was really
over when the U.S. made the massive financial commitment to
Project Apollo and the Soviets failed to match it. Not only
was Korolev compelled to work within budgets cut to half or
less of his estimated requirements, the modest Soviet spending
on space was divided among competing design bureaux whose
chief designers engaged in divisive and counterproductive
feuds. Korolev's
N-1 Moon rocket used 30 first stage engines
designed by a jet engine designer with modest experience with
rockets because Korolev and supreme Soviet propulsion
designer Valentin Glushko were not on speaking terms, and he
was forced to test the whole grotesque lash-up for the first time
in flight, as there wasn't the money for a ground test
stand for the complete first stage. Unlike the “all-up”
testing of the Apollo-Saturn program, where each individual
component was exhaustively ground tested in isolation before being
committed to flight,
it
didn't work. It wasn't just the Soviets who took risks
in those wild and wooly days, however. When an apparent fuel
leak threatened to delay the launch of
Explorer-I, the U.S. reply
to Sputnik, brass in the bunker asked for a volunteer “without
any dependants” to go out and scope out the situation
beneath the fully-fuelled rocket, possibly leaking toxic
hydrazine
(p. 175).
There are a number of factual goofs. I'm not sure the author fully
understands orbital mechanics which is, granted, a pretty geeky topic, but
one which matters when you're writing about space exploration. She writes
that the Jupiter C re-entry experiment reached a velocity (p. 154)
of 1600 mph (actually 16,000 mph), that Yuri Gararin's Vostok capsule orbited
(p. 242) at 28,000 mph (actually 28,000 km/h), and that if Apollo 8's service
module engine had failed to fire after arriving at the Moon (p. 325), the astronauts
“would sail on forever, lost in space” (actually, they were on a
“free return” trajectory, which would have taken them back to
Earth even if the engine failed—the critical moment was actually when
they fired the same engine to leave lunar orbit on Christmas Day 1968, which
success caused James Lovell to radio after emerging from behind the
Moon after the critical burn, “Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus”).
Orbital attitude (the orientation of the craft) is confused with altitude
(p. 267), and retro-rockets are described as
“breaking rockets” (p. 183)—let's hope not!
While these and other quibbles will irk space buffs, they shouldn't deter
you from enjoying this excellent narrative.
A U.S. edition is now available. The author
earlier worked on the production of a BBC docu-drama also titled
Space Race, which is now
available on DVD. Note, however, that this is a PAL DVD with a
region code of 2, and will not play unless you have a compatible
DVD player and television; I have not seen this programme.
October 2007 