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The Rocket Men by Rex Hall and David Shayler, Springer-Verlag, £19.50,
ISBN 185233391X

ALL OVER the world, space equals NASA. So great were the agency’s
achievements in the 1960s that even today few other names evoke space quite so
well. Ironically, NASA was formed in 1958 because the Soviet Union had already
beaten the US in the space race.

On 4 October 1957, the USSR launched the world’s first satellite. Over the
next eight years, there were more Soviet firsts: the first animal in space, the
first human, the first probe to the Moon, and so on.

Two men, among the thousands involved in these Soviet feats, can be singled
out for special mention: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, visionary theoretician at the
turn of the 20th century, and Sergei Korolev, visionary engineer of the cold
war. Their lives barely overlapped but between them they did more to launch the
Soviet Union into space than anyone else.

In 1903, Tsiolkovsky published his paper “The Exploration of Cosmic Space by
Reaction Devices”. He was ignored by Tsarist Russia but adulated and sponsored
by the Soviet state from 1925 until his death ten years later. Young engineers,
including Korolev, devoured his theories. After the tribulations of Stalin’s
purges and the Second World War, he rose to become the country’s chief missile
designer. When the cold war shifted into space Korolev was the driving force
behind the Soviet Space programme, from Sputnik through Vostok to Voskhod.
Rocket Men provides another insight into what still tends to be the unrecognised
pioneering nation of space flight.