The Red Rockets' Glare
Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957

An academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program, situating the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within Russian and Soviet history.

Asif A. Siddiqi (Author)

9781107639324, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 February 2014

418 pages, 33 b/w illus. 1 map 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

'… full of minute but fascinating detail … easy to read.' Spaceflight

The Red Rockets' Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering - seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate line between secret work on rockets (which interested the military) and public prognostications on the cosmos (which captivated the populace). Sputnik, he argues, was the outcome of both large-scale state imperatives to harness science and technology and populist phenomena that frequently owed little to the whims and needs of the state apparatus.

Introduction
1. A space for science and a science for space
2. 'Grief and genius'
3. Imagining the cosmos
4. Local action, state imperatives
5. 'All of this requires investigation'
6. Russians in Germany
7. Cold War and the creation of the Soviet ICBM
8. Fellow travelers
9. Launching Sputnik
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]