My third book was The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. The book was the first detailed academic study on the roots of the Soviet space program. Based on several years of work at various state and private archives in Russia, the work traces the origins of Russian fascination in the cosmos to the late 19th century when growing literacy, a vibrant private media, and popular fascination with technology fostered an interest in space travel. In the book, I argue that Sputnik was the outcome of both large-scale state imperatives to harness science and technology and ground-up populist phenomena that frequently owed little to the whims and needs of the state (and, in fact, were often at odds with it). The book is unique partly because it takes a multi-disciplinary approach to recovering the preamble to Sputnik, weaving social, intellectual, cultural, and technological history together into a single narrative. There’s a lot of information at the Cambridge site for the book here.
The book received the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society in 2011.
The Washington Post (October 23, 2019) included it as one of its “[g]reat books about the space race.”
Filling Space (November 22, 2019) included it among its list of “five spaceflight history books you should read.”
I had good conversation about the book on the “New Books in Russian Studies” podcast on September 30, 2016. See here.
My first book was Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974, published in 2000 by the NASA History Office. The book was later split in two and republished by the University Press of Florida in 2003 under the following titles: Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Vol. 1) and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo (Vol. 2).
The book was the first major work on the Cold War-era Soviet space program that benefited from the opening of archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the book, I trace the history of the Soviet space program, from its origins in the post-World War II era to the collapse of its Moon program in the mid-1970s. The focus here was largely on the Soviet human spaceflight program, particularly the spectacular successes of the 1960s such as the launch of first human in space Yuri Gagarin in 1961 and the first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. The centerpiece of the book is a lengthy description of the failed Soviet Moon program, a massive project to match the American Apollo program to send a human to the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
The book has received a number of awards and honors:
The Wall Street Journal (December 30, 2006) called it one of the “five best” books on space exploration.
It received the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society in 2001.
The magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology gave it its “year-end laurels” in 2001.
The book also received the History Manuscript Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1998.
NOTE no. 1: Please DO NOT buy the exorbitantly-priced reprints of this book that ripoff-vendors are selling on Amazon.
NASA has posted the book on its website. See here and here.
The book is also posted in a number of different formats at archive.org
NOTE no. 2: Also, DO NOT buy the paperback reprints of this book (published in two volumes) that are sold by University Press of Florida. Not only do they have confusing names (Vol 1: Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge and Vol 2: The Soviet Space Race with Apollo) but I have NOTHING to do with them. They are awful and poor-quality reproductions and do a disservice to the original.