The Wrong Stuff
How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A witty, deeply researched history of the surprisingly ramshackle Soviet space program, and how its success was more spin than science.
In the wake of World War II, with America ascendant and the Soviet Union devastated by the conflict, the Space Race should have been over before it started. But the underdog Soviets scored a series of victories--starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik and continuing in the years following--that seemed to achieve the impossible. It was proof, it seemed, that the USSR had manpower and collective will that went beyond America's material advantages. They had asserted themselves as a world power.
But in The Wrong Stuff, John Strausbaugh tells a different story. These achievements were amazing, yes, but they were also PR victories as much as scientific ones. The world saw a Potemkin spaceport; the internal facts were much sloppier, less impressive, more dysfunctional. The Soviet supply chain was a disaster, and many of its machines barely worked. The cosmonauts aboard its iconic launch of the Vostok 1 rocket had to go on a special diet, and take off their space suits, just to fit inside without causing a failure. Soviet scientists, under intense government pressure, had essentially made their rocket out of spit and band aids, and hurried to hide their work as soon as their worldwide demonstration was complete.
With a witty eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, John Strausbaugh takes us behind the Iron Curtain, and shows just how little there was to find there.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This buzzy yet unbalanced account of the Soviet space race from historian Strausbaugh (Victory City) plays on the title of Tom Wolfe's account of American astronauts, The Right Stuff. Strausbaugh opines that the Soviets—who launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, into space in 1957; the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961; and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963—relied on the "wrong stuff." Drawing from published histories and memoirs (such as Mathew Brzezinski's Red Moon Rising), he relates a string of near-catastrophes, deadly flukes, and cover-ups. He portrays key players in the Soviet program as hard drinkers with "reckless bravado," who under unrelenting political pressure sent cosmonauts into orbit with glitchy equipment, and suggests the Soviet government kept its lead in the space race through subterfuge: when the first animal (a dog named Laika) was sent into orbit in 1957, "the Soviets issued false reports was doing fine"; later, when a fire broke out aboard the aging space station Mir, Russian authorities "blandly lied" about how safe the highly flammable oxygen containers were. Though captivating, these anecdotes deserve scrutiny. Strausbaugh relies heavily on secondhand sources and familiar tropes of Russian bravery teetering on madness. He also issues generic criticisms of "a society rotten with corruption and almost guaranteed to underperform," and underassesses Soviet scientific achievements. Readers earnestly interested in the topic will want to explore elsewhere.
