The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned

Strausbaugh reexamines the familiar topic of the Soviet Union’s initial lead in the space race with the United States, an advantage that lasted from 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, until the mid-1960s. Given the Soviet Union’s postwar devastation, poverty, and famine, this achievement was close to a miracle. And in Washington, it was a cause for anxiety and apprehension. In the early 1970s, a Soviet defector exposed Soviet achievements as “space bluff,” which hid failures and created illusions about technological capacities. A wealth of previously classified documents that have become available since the collapse of the Soviet Union mostly confirm the notion that the Soviet space program was not nearly as robust as it seemed. Strausbaugh’s book is based on those documents, as well as the vast existing literature. He writes about Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s burning desire to upstage the Americans, a drive that put Soviet engineers and spacecraft designers under enormous pressure, resulting in unsafe, slapdash contraptions and exposing the first Soviet cosmonauts to extremely high risks. These cosmonauts were squeezed into ridiculously small capsules, with virtually no protective gear and no hope for emergency evacuation. Astonishingly, they often pulled off successful launches and flights. The American landing on the moon put an end to the Soviet advantage in crewed flights. The book is interspersed with Soviet political jokes and, unfortunately, is not free of factual inaccuracies.