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Soviets in Space - Colin Burgess ***

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s when human spaceflight – one of the most exciting of all endeavours, in my (admittedly biased) opinion – was progressing at a headlong pace. There were only two players in those days, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the information available was distinctly asymmetric. The nerds among us might have wanted technical specifications and high quality photographs of all that gleaming space-age hardware, but we only really got that on the American side. Soviet news releases focused much more on the lives and personalities of the cosmonauts, and their spectacular achievements in space – particularly if they were world firsts.

In essence, that’s what Colin Burgess provides in this book, updated for a new generation of readers who may not even have been born when the Soviet Union disintegrated 30 years ago. Bookended by a historical introduction and forward-looking final chapter, it’s a chronological mission-by-mission account of the Soviet space programme from the Vostok flights of the early sixties to the Mir space station of the 1980s. In line with the Soviets’ own favoured perspective, the emphasis is very much on the cosmonauts who flew the missions, and their assorted triumphs and mishaps, rather than technical details of their space vehicles (which Burgess scarcely touches on).

So you’ll learn, for example, that Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman in space in June 1963 – an honour thousands would have given their right arms for – displayed a ‘constant lack of enthusiasm’ for the mission. When the first multi-seat spacecraft, Voskhod 1, took off the following year, one of its crew members, Konstantin Feoktistov, wasn’t a trained astronaut at all, but a brilliant engineer who had been involved in designing the spacecraft – in some ways, perhaps, the first ever ‘space tourist’. And the intended commander of the ill-fated Soyuz 11 mission was Alexei Leonov, who had already made history with the first spacewalk, and would go on to take part in the binational Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – but (fortunately for him, as it turned out) he was dropped a few hours before launch due to health concerns.

Those are just a few examples that I found particularly striking because they were new to me, but the book is packed with similarly fascinating anecdotes which are far from being common knowledge. So if that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for in a history of space travel, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy this book. Personally, however, I can’t help feeling disappointed, because the title and dustjacket copy led me to expect a greater depth of analysis and commentary than Burgess actually provides.

For one thing, I would have liked to see a ‘compare and contrast’ between the Soviet and American approaches to what were essentially the same set of problems. Why did Soviet rockets have a large number of small engines while their American counterparts had a smaller number of larger engines? Why did the first American astronauts breathe pure oxygen at low pressure, while Soviet cosmonauts used normal air at normal pressure? Perhaps questions like these don’t have clear-cut answers, but surely it’s at least worth acknowledging that the two sides went about things in different ways. Similarly, we’re told at one point that the Soviet Union abandoned the idea of going to the Moon in favour of developing long-duration orbiting laboratories, but we’re not told why they did that. What, from a Soviet point of view, were the political and scientific pros and cons of a lunar landing versus a laboratory in Earth orbit?

There’s another omission that I feel is non-trivial enough to be worth mentioning. For myself, and I suspect most readers, it’s difficult to see the word ‘Soviet’ without immediately thinking of the Cold War. For better or worse, that comes with certain stereotyped expectations revolving around espionage, subterfuge and propaganda – and the early space programmes of both the Soviet Union and the United States weren’t exempt from this. On the Soviet side, there have always been rumours of disastrously fatal space flights that were quickly hushed up and airbrushed out of history. Maybe they’re just malicious rumours, but many people will have heard of them, and it’s remiss not to mention them in a book like this – even if it’s only to categorically disprove them. Less well known is the fact that one of the early proposals for the Apollo spacecraft, produced by the General Electric company, looked remarkably like the Soviet Union’s Soyuz, years before the latter entered public awareness. There’s a hint here of the kind of international espionage (either east to west or vice versa) that Cold War buffs thrive on, and I feel it’s a missed opportunity not to even touch on things like this.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a shallow book – far from it. On the topics Burgess is interested in, i.e. the cosmonaut’s stories and their achievements in space, it’s thoroughly researched and authoritative. On the other hand, the book doesn’t give much insight into the technical challenges or political context lying behind those achievements. If this review seems a little negative, it’s because those were the aspects I really wanted to read about.

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Review by Andrew May - Subscribe to a weekly digest including popular science reviews for free here
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