Race Beyond the Sky

On the night of October 4, 1957, a Soviet rocket lifted a polished metal sphere into orbit, and the beep of Sputnik told the world that the space age had begun — and that the Cold War had a new front, in the sky. In barely a dozen years, two superpowers would carry human beings off the Earth for the first time and set their boots upon the Moon.

This is the whole sweep, told in a single volume and from both sides: the lonely dreamers and the slave-built V-2 that gave both nations their first rockets; the shock of Sputnik and the birth of NASA; Gagarin's single orbit and Kennedy's audacious gamble; the methodical American climb through Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo while the secret Soviet program squandered its early lead; the years when the race killed — the Apollo 1 fire, the death of Korolev, the loss of Komarov and Gagarin; the triumph of Apollo 11 before a watching world; and the 1975 handshake in orbit that brought the contest to its close.

Sober, sourced, and sweeping, this is a clear-eyed popular history of the most extraordinary competition of the twentieth century — how it came, how it was waged, who won and who lost and why, and what it built that outlived the rivalry that paid for it.