Availability of
"SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, Satellites and the Beginning of the Space Age"
Copyright:Copernicus/Springer Verlag (New York)
These pages are not available for adverts on this site.
Book description.
The IGY meeting in Washington was reported in the New York Times, October 4, 1957.
The anecdote about Korolev's conversation with Alexei Leonov a few nights before he died comes from Jim Harford. Harford also talked to me about Korolev's visit to Peenemunde after World War II.
Khrushchev's views of the significance to the Soviet Union of ICBMs are to be found in his autobiography, Khrushchev Remembers: The last testament, translated by Strobe Talbot (Little Brown).
Khrushchev describes his casual attitude toward Korolev's news of the launch of Sputnik to James Reston in an interview published in the New York Times on October 8, 1957. Khrushchev says he congratulated Korolev, then went to bed.
An understanding of what life in prison was like for Korolev can be found in The First Circle, by Aleksandor Solzhenitsyn.
Though Chapter One is about Korolev because it was his satellite that opened the space age, Robert Goddard was the man who built and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket--a fact of which Korolev was well aware. A companion book for anyone interested in the pioneering days of rocketry therefore is Robert H. Goddard: Pioneer of Space Research, by Milton Lehman (Da Capo Press, 1988). The footnote about the launch of the world's first liquid-fueled rocket comes from this book. Lehman's book was published first as This High Man (Da Capo Press, 1963).
I found information about general historical events, such as the coup Khrushchev faced down in June 1957 (page 11), in A History of the Soviet Union, by Geoffrey Hosking (Fontana, 1985).
Chapter two: Cocktails and the Blues
A flavor of the times described in this chapter comes from my interview with William Pickering, Milton Rosen (technical director of Project Van-
240
|