Those growing up in the 1950s and 1960s knew about the Space Race. The United States and the Soviet Union were contending for mastery in the High Frontier. It looked like the Soviets were winning: first satellite in orbit, first animal in orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit. The United States was hopelessly behind.
“The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned,” by John Strausbaugh, reveals the reality. The Soviet Space program was a kludgy mess. Its only goal through 1969 was one-upping the United States, doing what the United States planned next in space before Americans could get to it. It existed to troll the United States.
The book’s opening skips to the Voskhod 1 mission—the first time a spacecraft launched multiple people into orbit. Its real goal was beating the upcoming first U.S. Gemini flight, planned to place two men into space in late 1964. Then First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev ordered rocket designer Sergei Korolev to put three men into orbit before then.
Korolev stripped a Vostok capsule, putting in three “bucket recliners” to fit three very small cosmonauts. Weight limits meant they had to fly in street clothes, not space suits. The three passengers had to lose weight before flying. It used the one-man life support of the Vostok, limiting available oxygen, and had inadequate thermal control for three. Temperatures became sweltering. Its new landing system failed when tested, destroying the test capsule. Everyone expected disaster. Miraculously everything worked, and the cosmonauts survived.
Mr. Strausbaugh shows this was typical. Sputnik 1 flew to beat out Explorer 1. Sputnik’s only instrument was a radio transmitter—all Korolev could manage in the time available. Laika, the dog launched on Sputnik 2, died of overheating early in the mission. Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin’s first manned flight was done to beat out the upcoming Mercury suborbital flight. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space because a cover article in Look magazine implied that NASA was considering women astronauts. (NASA was not. Tereshkova’s qualifications were that she was a loyal communist and expert parachutist.)
Unnecessary danger prevailed to achieve space firsts. Vostok had a design flaw that nearly killed Gagarin. Uncorrected, it caused similar problems on future flights. The airlock added to Voskhod 2 for the first spacewalk mission was so badly designed that the cosmonaut partially depressurized his spacesuit to reenter his spacecraft. On Soyuz 11, the crew was told to ignore a light warning that the hatch was improperly sealed. They suffocated on reentry.
“The Wrong Stuff” is eye-opening. It reveals the Potemkin village nature of Soviet space and the length the Soviets went to upstage the United States. It is well worth reading.
