Rockets and People Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War

In this third volume of a planned four-volume set of memoirs, the famous Russian spacecraft designer Boris Chertok, who worked under the legendary Sergey Korolev, continues his fascinating narrative on the early history of the Soviet space program, from 1961 to 1967, arguably the peak of the effort. Chertok devotes a significant portion of the volume to the early years of Soviet human space flight in the early 1960’s. These include a chapter on the Vostok and Voskhod programs, which left an indelible mark on early years of the “space race,” a lengthy meditation on the origins and early missions of the Soyuz space program, the flight and death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov during the very first piloted Soyuz flight in 1967. Additional chapters cover robotic programs such as the Molniya communications satellite system, the Zenit spy satellite program, and the Luna series of probes that culminated in the world’s first survivable landing of a probe on the surface of the Moon. Chertok also devotes several chapters to the development of early generations of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles and missile defense systems. Chertok’s chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis provides a radically unique perspective on the 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. Two further chapters cover the untimely deaths of the most important luminaries of the era: Sergey Korolev and Yuriy Gagarin. Finally, historians of Soviet science will find much of the interest in the concluding chapter focused on the relationship between the space program and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.