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

by Asif A. Siddiqi

• ISBN13: 9780521897600
• ISBN10: 0521897602
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
A Space for Science and a Science for Space	p. 16
"Grief and Genius"	p. 43
Imagining the Cosmos	p. 74
Local Action, State Imperatives	p. 114
"All of This Requires Investigation"	p. 155
Russians in Germany	p. 196
The Cold War and the Creation of the Soviet	p. 241
Fellow Travelers	p. 290
Launching Sputnik	p. 332
Conclusion	p. 363
Notes about Abbreviations in Citations	p. 373
Notes on Usage	p. 376
A Note on Primary Sources	p. 377
Index	p. 389
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