J. Brit. Astron. Assoc., 106, 4, 1996
John Wiley/Praxis Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-471-96014-4. Pp xvi + 408, £24.95 (hbk).
reviewed by Donald Shirreff
The author, historian by training and sociologist-cum-broadcaster by profession, has supplemented his original Race into Space (Ellis Horwood, 1988) with this second version, based on new post-glasnost information. He deals with all aspects of the enormous Russian unmanned satellite effort. For two decades the Soviets were launching large (eight ton) Cosmos satellites at a rate of at least one a week, mainly for defence purposes but also matching the American effort in civilian projects. There are some interesting revelations: owing to their inferior strategic situation the Soviets were forced to develop a 'hunter-killer' vehicle capable of catching and destroying enemy observation satellites, and a heavy nuclear-powered ocean radar satellite for detecting submarines.
But the book rightly concentrates on the history of manned spaceflight and orbiting observatories. While we in the West were reading H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an obscure maths teacher in a Russian provincial town, was doing serious pioneering work on the theory of spaceflight and liquid-fuelled rockets (1895). The new Soviet government, which accorded great prestige to engineers and scientists, made Tsiolkovsky a member of the Academy of Sciences (1919). In 1927 an 'Exhibition of Interplanetary Machines' was staged in Moscow. When in 1945 victory provided examples of German rocketry the Soviets were not so dependent on German experts and technology as ourselves. By 1957 they had their own design of rocket (the R-7) capable of putting an ICBM down anywhere on Earth, or a capsule weighing 1.35 tons into orbit. Described as 'the workhorse of the Soviet space effort', it was shown to the public (including myself) at the Moscow Science Park in the summer of 1967. It surprised us by being a bundle of 20 rockets strapped together in fours – the outer four bundles being jettisoned on the way into orbit. We would not have been surprised, had we read Tsiolkovsky.
In November 1959 the Academy of Sciences decided to go for manned orbital flight. On 1961 April 12, after repeated tests of the effects of radiation and weightlessness on dogs, Yury Gagarin flew one orbit, and the rest is history. In view of a recent TV science programme implying that the Soviet training of cosmonauts was ruthless and careless of lives, I compiled a list from the accidents mentioned in the book. There have been four deaths in two missions, the last that of Soyuz 11in June 1971. Now in orbit is Soyuz TM21 (66 missions later). There have been six hazardous or premature descents due to malfunctions or illness of a crew member. For the last ten years there has always been a Soyuz escape vehicle attached to the Mir space station, as there will be on the combined American–Russian International Space Station now under construction.
The author also mentions politics behind the scenes. The painstaking and gradualist approach sponsored by the Academy was disrupted by Kruschev, who wanted to compete with the American missions to the Moon and Mars. By this time the Americans were superior in microtechnology, and there were too many failures in Soviet unmanned missions to these distant targets. Politics are also playing their part now. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the present hardship among its people, resources spent on space are difficult to justify. President Yeltsin himself campaigned during the last election on a platform which included the slogan 'Sausages not Space'. It is very fortunate that shortage of cash persuaded the American government in September 1993 to abandon its own Space Station programme and take the Russians on as partners. If I were to make a criticism of the book it would perhaps be of the title: what the Russian space authorities are doing is not so much a programme, as a strategy for survival.
There are two mistakes: p.122, surely minus 22°C; p.273, 'CO2 level too low'. Should that not be 'too high'?
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