I found this book to be a bit too much focused on Wernher von Braun and Sergei Pavlovich Korolev to my liking—however influential and inspirational they were, they didn't get people into space by themselves. Having read other books about space race, this one didn't really tell me that much that I hadn't already read about, but it flowed fluently and worked really well to keep the American and the Soviet space development stories on the same timeline side by side. ( )

With the 40th anniversary of the end of the Apollo program approaching, the past few years have seen a number of books telling the History of the "Space Race". One day someone will write the seminal book on that period of history. This is not that book. It basically contrasts the lives of the two men most associated, in the public's mind, with the Moon race. Both Men are now dead and unable to defend or correct what has been written about them. Given the nature of the times, with regard to de-classified documents and revisionist history, this book makes the argument that Wernher Von Braun could have been guilty of war crimes. As I said, I am waiting for the right person to explore this period of the Cold War. We need to know that facts and have the correct story in detail. A casual re-telling will not do. ( )

A clearly-written exploration of the race between the USA and the Soviet Union to be first to put a man on the Moon. The story is told through the histories of the two project leaders - Wernher von Braun in Germany, and Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Union's 'Chief Designer of Rockets'.

The author pulls no punches in describing conditions in the Mittelwerk, the underground factory in the Harz Mountains in Germany where slave labour built the V-2s, and comparing that with the Gulag where Korolev was imprisoned - the difference being that von Braun never had to suffer the conditions his workers toiled under. The text is quite vociferous at laying much of the blame for conditions in the Mittelwerk at the feet of its SS military commander, a nasty piece of work called Kammler who didn't survive the war to be brought to justice; though an epilogue, which tells the story of what happened after the Moon landings, exposes the charges levelled during the1980s at von Braun as to his role in the use of slave labour; but by then, von Braun had been dead nearly ten years.

Korolev gets a better crack of the whip; his incarceration in the Gulag was laid at Stalin's feet, though Cadbury doesn't explore the charge that Korolev had actually been diverting funds away from the research institute where he worked and putting them to rocketry. His rehabilitation, as a matter of technical expediency, did not involve any clever footwork to avoid difficult questions, as happened when von Braun reached America; and the revelations about his identity and hardships after his death all worked to his posthumous good. Korolev's early death following bowel surgery is described in considerable, toe-curling detail; it was the turning point for the Soviet Moon project and so merits inclusion, whereas von Braun lived to see his dream achieved.

Both men suffered at the hands of their governments, though in von Braun's case that suffering was minimal in comparison both to Korolev and to that his workers had to endure. The book is quite clear that von Braun and his team were very much aware that the collapsing Third Reich would have no qualms at all about executing them to prevent their knowledge falling into the hands of Germany's enemies, no matter how lost the Nazi cause was. Von Braun's urgent need to sell out to the best bidder is quite clearly shown and understood; the Russians made attractive offers to try to entice some of the V-2 team to go east, and some did; but they soon found that once their immediate usefulness was over, their positions ceased to be as comfortable as they had hoped.

Perhaps the most interesting contrast between the two men is the way they reacted to their situation. Whilst von Braun was looking to sell out to new masters (not without good reason), Korolev was surviving the Gulag. Although he was later transferred to one of the special Gulag camps, reserved for highly technically-skilled prisoners where they could do work that would be useful to the State like designing aeroplanes or rockets, he never forgot the harshness of his treatment. Yet such was his patriotism that he never swerved from his course, or expressed any disloyalty to the Communist cause. This was only partly enlightened self-interest; there are many accounts of Russians in the Gulag expressing dismay when Stalin died, or continuing to work for the benefit of the State and the Party when their situations eased.

Both men had to struggle to get official backing; the bureaucracy in the USA was almost as bad as that in the Soviet Union and this delayed the early development of both men's projects. Inter-service rivalry in the USA was in part responsible for the multiple instances of failed launches the Americans suffered. A similar state of affairs in Russia was down more to shortages of equipment, material and facilities. That the Russians were first to launch a satellite, and first to put a person in orbit, was partly down to sheer luck; but once the Americans were spurred to action, they kept pouring resources into their project. The Russians' luck ran out with the design of the gigantic, over-complex N-1 rocket that was the Soviet equivalent to NASA's Saturn V. The complexity of what really is, after all, rocket science had been a pitfall for both sides throughout; NASA got a hold of the problem through improving project planning and being able to devote resources to the project.

The book is a quick and easy read; once the Soviet project fails, though, the story of the Apollo programme is a bit rushed. It talks at length about the Apollo 1 fire (again, some of this spares little detail), and the proving flights of first the unmanned capsules, then the test flights - Apollo 8 to circle the moon, then Apollos 9 and 10 to test out the Lunar Module - are generally glossed over so that the story of the Apollo 11 landing, with Neil Armstrong's split-second decisions over continuing the powered descent despite running the fuel tanks almost dry can be told in detail. Once that's done, the race is won and the epilogue quickly follows, telling something of what happened to von Braun after Apollo (as I said earlier), and the fate of some of the other players on the Soviet side.

The book was written to accompany a BBC television series of drama-documentaries of the same name, broadcast in 2005. But it goes well beyond being just a supporting text and instead is a good single-volume story of perhaps the most high-profile battleground of the Cold War. ( )

Not quite as technical as I would have liked, but a good overview of the chronology and 2 of the leading personalities. ( )

This tells the story of Sergei Korolev who despite doing time in one of Stalin's Gulags became the Chief Designer of the Soviet Space Programme and Wernher von Braun who despite his Nazi past became the father of the U.S Space Programme. This was a really interesting read about the race to be the first to put a man in space, and of course land on the moon.
Despite my love of the space programme I have a big problem with von Braun's part in it. I know that not everybody who joined the Nazi party did so because they shared their beliefs many were just trying to protect their families, but in von Braun's case he did it because he believed that joining the party would help with his space flight ambitions. There was plenty of evidence that von Braun knew all about the slave labour that was used to build his V2 rockets, and about the 20,000 who died building them. Instead of being tried and executed as a war criminal he was spirited out of the country and his past was covered up because the powers that be thought he might have knowledge that was useful to them and they didn't want Stalin getting his hands on it. Moral of the story if you are going to be a war criminal please make sure you have skills and knowledge that are valuable to the winning side and then you will not only get away with it you will be encouraged to pursue your own ambitions. ( )