THE WRONG STUFF

Far from being a technological wonder, the Soviet space program was marked by rickety machines and awful decisions.

Strausbaugh has written a number of interesting books, including Victory City and The Village, and his droll sense of humor fits well with this examination of the Soviet space program, which was a comedy of errors held together with duct tape and bureaucratic obfuscation. The leader who did the most to drive the program, Nikita Khrushchev, was more interested in the potential for propaganda victories than actual space exploration, although he also wanted to use the technology for intercontinental missiles. He repeatedly pushed the scientists in the program to move far more quickly than they wanted to beat the U.S. and garner global headlines. The result was that rockets and capsules were often cobbled together at the last moment, using cosmonauts with minimal training. Yet with ingenuity and luck, the program achieved some remarkable feats, including the first satellite, first manned orbit, and first spacewalk. Strausbaugh, working with newly available archival material, shows how the background to the successes was repeated, and often tragic, failure. He readily admits that sending humans into space is intrinsically difficult, but he traces many of the program’s problems to the highly flawed system itself. “The Soviets were happy to hide how fantastically dysfunctional they were,” writes the author. “The truth was that if anyone was good at making communism work, it wasn’t the Soviets. With them it was just more tsarist-style big man autocracy in Marxist-Leninist drag.” By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the space program had effectively ended. Strausbaugh clearly enjoyed writing this entertaining book, an accessible, engaging story about an era that, for better or worse, is nearly forgotten.

With illustrative anecdotes and telling quotes, Strausbaugh gets to the truth behind a Potemkin facade.