Much has been written in the West on the history of the Soviet space program but few Westerners have read direct first-hand accounts of the men and women who were behind the many Russian accomplishments in exploring space. The memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, translated from the original Russian, fills that gap. Chertok began his career as an electrician in 1930 at an aviation factory near Moscow. Twenty-seven years later, he became deputy to the founding figure of the Soviet space program, the mysterious "Chief Designer" Sergey Korolev. Chertok's sixty-year-long career and the many successes and failures of the Soviet space program constitute the core of his memoirs, Rockets and People. In these writings, spread over four volumes, Academician Chertok not only describes and remembers, but also elicits and extracts profound insights from an epic story about a society's quest to explore the cosmos. In Volume 1, Chertok describes his early years as an engineer and ends with the mission to Germany after the end of World War II when the Soviets captured Nazi missile technology and expertise. Volume 2 takes up the story with the development of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and ends with the launch of Sputnik and the early Moon probes. In Volume 3, Chertok recollects the great successes of the Soviet space program in the 1960s including the launch of the world's first space voyager Yuriy Gagarin as well as many events connected with the Cold War. Finally, in Volume 4, Chertok meditates at length on the massive Soviet lunar project designed to beat the Americans to the Moon in the 1960s, ending with his remembrances of the Energiya-Buran project.
About the Author: Boris Yevseyevich Chertok was born in 1912 in Poland, and his family moved to Moscow when he was three years old. In 1930, he began work as an electrician in a Moscow suburb. In 1934, he joined the design bureau of Viktor Bolkhovitinov, a noted designer of bombers. In 1946, Chertok joined the newly established NII-88 institute as head of the control systems department and worked hand-in-hand with legendary Chief Designer Sergey Korolev. Chertok became one of Korolev's closest aides in developing control systems for ballistic missiles and spacecraft, eventually becoming deputy chief designer of the famous OKB-1, the design organization that spun off from NII-88 in 1956. Chertok participated in every major project at OKB-1 (now the Energiya Rocket-Space Corporation, RKK Energiya) until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when he retired from active work. Academician Chertok currently lives in Moscow and serves as the Chief Scientific Consultant to RKK Energiya. His four-volume memoirs "Rekety I lyudi" (Rockets and People) were published in Moscow between 1994 and 1999. Asif A. Siddiqi is an Assistant Professor of history at Fordham University in New York. In 2008-2009 he was a visiting Fellow at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Dr. Siddiqi is the author of a number of books on the history of space flight including "Challenge to Apollo: the Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974" (NASA, 2000) and the "Red Rockets' Glare: Soviet Imaginations and the Birth of Sputnik"¬¬¬¬ (Cambridge University Press, 2099)