Book Description
It was all part of man's greatest adventure--landing men on
the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge
of the universe and the birth of stars, and launching
planetary explorers across the solar system to Neptune and
beyond.
The ancient dream of breaking gravity's hold and taking to
space became a reality only because of the intense cold-war
rivalry between the superpowers, with towering geniuses like
Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolyov shelving dreams of
space travel and instead developing rockets for ballistic
missiles and space spectaculars. Now that Russian archives
are open and thousands of formerly top-secret U.S. documents
are declassified, an often startling new picture of the space
age emerges:
the frantic effort by the Soviet Union to beat the United
States to the Moon was doomed from the beginning by gross
inefficiency and by infighting so treacherous that Winston
Churchill likened it to "dogs fighting under a
carpet";
there was more than science behind the United States'
suggestion that satellites be launched during the
International Geophysical Year, and in one crucial respect,
Sputnik was a godsend to Washington;
the hundred-odd German V-2s that provided the vital start to
the U.S. missile and space programs legally belonged to the
Soviet Union and were spirited to the United States in a
derring-do operation worthy of a spy thriller;
despite NASA's claim that it was a civilian agency, it had an
intimate relationship with the military at the outset and
still does--a distinction the Soviet Union never pretended to
make;
constant efforts to portray astronauts and cosmonauts as
"Boy Scouts" were often contradicted by reality;
the Apollo missions to the Moon may have been an unexcelled
political triumph and feat of exploration, but they also
created a headache for the space agency that lingers to this
day.
This New Ocean is based on 175 interviews with Russian and
American scientists and engineers; on archival documents,
including formerly top-secret National Intelligence Estimates
and spy satellite pictures; and on nearly three decades of
reporting. The impressive result is this fascinating
story--the first comprehensive account--of the space age.
Here are the strategists and war planners; engineers and
scientists; politicians and industrialists; astronauts and
cosmonauts; science fiction writers and journalists; and
plain, ordinary, unabashed dreamers who wanted to transcend
gravity's shackles for the ultimate ride. The story is
written from the perspective of a witness who was present at
the beginning and who has seen the conclusion of the first
space age and the start of the second.
