Much has been written in the W est on the history of the Soviet space program but few Westerners have read direct first-hand accounts of the men and women who were behind the many Russian accomplishments in exploring space.The memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, who worked under the legendary Sergey Korolev, translated from the original Russian, fill that gap.
In this last volume of his four-volume set of memoirs, the famous Russian spacecraft designer Boris Chertok, who worked under the legendary Sergey Korolev, continues his fascinating narrative on the history of the Soviet space program, this time covering 1968 to 1974, the peak years of the Soviet human lunar program. Chertok devotes a significant portion of the volume to the origins and development of the N-1 rocket.
One of the values of this volume is Chertok’s lengthy description of the origins of the Soviet space station program, which began with the Salyut space stations in the early 1970s and concluded with the multimodule Mir complex in the 1980s.
Perhaps the most poignant chapters here are the ones on the tragic Soyuz-11 mission when cosmonauts Dobrovolskiy, Volkov, and Patsayev were killed on reentry.
Chertok concludes the book with a lengthy description of the end of the N-1 program and the birth of the Energiya-Buran program under the leadership of Valentin Glushko. His account provides a fascinating inside look at the political, technological, and personal conflicts at a time when the Soviet space program was at its zenith.
