Rockets and people

What Hacker News says

1. orbital-decaySep 2026
   >The space race was to get to the moon.

   That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.

   You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).

   Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.

   The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.

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2. trollerator23Oct 2022
   Or they can go to the source material for this clickbait article and read Rockets and People, by Chertok.
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3. ovi256Nov 2021
   This is a great compilation, very cleanly presented. If you'd like to learn more, in a much more verbose format, the "Rockets and People" four volume series of books by Boris Chertok (Korolev's right hand man) has been translated, courtesy of Nasa, and is available on archive.org

   https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Chertok%2C...

   Vol 4, The Moon Race: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4110/vol4.pdf

   They provide tremendous insight into running such ambitious development programs in a complex political, human and economic landscape.

   The aerospace industry in the URSS was privileged beyond belief. They were top of the list for scarce resources, including housing, materials and even people. Hard to recruit engineers and workers to a new launch site to be built from scratch in the middle of nowhere in remote Kazakhstan ? Triple the pay, convince the wives by adding an extra room to their state-provided apartments for life, and setting up an airline to Moscow with free tickets every month and private entry to the best department shops. There, done.

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4. krasinMay 2021
   One of the best books about soviet rocketry is "Rockets and People" ([1]). My blood boiled at how badly German engineers were treated on the Soviet side and how inefficient the use of their skills was. They literally landed Germans on an island and gave an important, but a standalone task (multi-channel telemetry). Over time, it became redundant and 7 years later all surviving german engineers were let to go home.

   It's one sin to steal; it a bigger sin to not use what you have efficiently.

   1. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta...

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5. avmichFeb 2021
   I'd strongly recommend Boris Chertok's "Rockets and People" - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta... . 4-volume first hand account (Chertok's immediate boss was Korolev and then Mishin, of N-1 fame, and Glushko, Energiya-Buran) . Really good memoirs about Soviet side of things.
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6. simplicioMar 2020
   I've been reading "Rockets and People" by Boris Chertok from this collection, and would recommend it. Chertok was a high-level engineer in the Russian Space industry, and its a much different story than the American side of things, with engineers having to work through a constant churn in the leadership caused by the purges, and than having their factories literally packed up and moved to avoid the German invasion, and than the scarcity of the post-WWII years.

   (on the downside, Chertok really likes pausing the narrative to map out the exact bureaucratic flow-chart of the different agencies and departments involved in rocket development, which is pretty tedious, but I've found I can just skim those sections without losing the ability to understand the rest of the story.)

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