- Chertok, Boris E.
Rockets and People. Vol. 1.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2005.
ISBN 978-1-4700-1463-6 NASA SP-2005-4110.
-
This is the first book of the author's monumental
four-volume autobiographical history of the Soviet missile
and space program.
Boris Chertok
was a survivor, living
through the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin's purges of the
1930s, World War II, all of the postwar conflict between
chief designers and their bureaux and rival politicians,
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in Poland
in 1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. After retiring
from the RKK Energia organisation in 1992 at the age
of 80, he wrote this work between 1994 and 1999.
Originally published in Russian in 1999, this
annotated English translation was prepared by the
NASA History Office under the direction of
Asif A. Siddiqi, author of
Challenge to Apollo (April 2008),
the definitive Western history of the Soviet space
program.
Chertok saw it all, from the earliest Soviet experiments with
rocketry in the 1930s, uncovering the secrets of the
German V-2 amid the rubble of postwar Germany (he was
the director of the
Institute RABE,
where German and Soviet specialists worked side by side laying
the foundations of postwar Soviet rocketry), the glory days of
Sputnik and Gagarin, the anguish of losing the Moon race, and the
emergence of Soviet preeminence in long-duration space station
operations.
The first volume covers Chertok's career up to the conclusion of his
work in Germany in 1947. Unlike Challenge to Apollo,
which is a scholarly institutional and technical history (and
consequently rather dry reading), Chertok gives you a visceral sense
of what it was like to be there: sometimes chilling, as in his
descriptions of the 1930s where he matter-of-factly describes his
supervisors and colleagues as having been shot or sent to Siberia
just as an employee in the West would speak of somebody being
transferred to another office, and occasionally funny, as when he
recounts the story of the imperious
Valentin Glushko
showing up at his door in a car belching copious smoke. It turns out
that Glushko had driven all the way with the handbrake on, and
his subordinate hadn't dared mention it because Glushko didn't like
to be distracted when at the wheel.
When the Soviets began to roll out their space spectaculars in the
late 1950s and early '60s, some in the West attributed their
success to the Soviets having gotten the “good German”
rocket scientists while the West ended up with the second team.
Chertok's memoir puts an end to such speculation. By the time
the Americans and British vacated the V-2 production areas,
they had packed up and shipped out hundreds of rail cars of
V-2 missiles and components and captured von Braun and all of his
senior staff, who delivered extensive technical documentation
as part of their surrender. This left the Soviets with pretty slim
pickings, and Chertok and his staff struggled to find components,
documents, and specialists left behind. This put them at
a substantial disadvantage compared to the U.S., but forced them
to reverse-engineer German technology and train their own people
in the disciplines of guided missilery rather than rely upon a
German rocket team.
History owes a great debt to Boris Chertok not only for the
achievements in his six decade career (for which he was
awarded Hero of Socialist Labour, the Lenin Prize, the
Order of Lenin [twice], and the USSR State Prize), but for
living so long and undertaking to document the momentous
events he experienced at the first epoch at which such
a candid account was possible. Only after the fall of the
Soviet Union could the events chronicled here be freely
discussed, and the merits and shortcomings of the Soviet system
in accomplishing large technological projects be weighed.
As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and an
online
PDF edition is available.
A Kindle edition is available which is perfectly
readable but rather cheaply produced. Footnotes simply appear in
the text in-line somewhere after the reference, set in small red
type. Words are occasionally run together and capitalisation is
missing on some proper nouns. The index references page numbers
from the print edition which are not included in the Kindle
version, and hence are completely useless. If you have a
workable PDF application on your reading device, I'd go with the
NASA PDF, which is not only better formatted but free.
The
original
Russian edition is available online.
May 2012 