Rockets and People: Volume IV: The Moon Race - Paperback

by Asif Siddiqi (Editor), Boris Chertok (Author)

In this, the fourth and final volume of his memoirs, Boris Chertok concludes his monumental trek through a nearly 100-year life. As with the previous English-language volumes, the text has been significantly modified and extended over the original Russian versions published in the 1990s. The first volume covered his childhood, early career, and transformation into a missile engineer by the end of World War II. In the second volume, he took the story up through the birth of the postwar Soviet ballistic-missile program and then the launch of the world's artificial satellite, Sputnik. This was followed, in the third volume, by a description of the early and spectacular successes of the Soviet space program in the 1960s, including such unprecedented achievements as the flight of cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin. The fourth volume concludes his memoirs on the history of the Soviet space program with a lengthy meditation on the failed Soviet human lunar program and then brings the story to a close with the events of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This, the fourth and final volume is largely devoted to the Soviet project to send cosmonauts to the Moon in the 1960s, covering all aspects of the development of the giant N-1 rocket. The last portion of this volume covers the origins of the Salyut and Mir space station programs, ending with a fascinating description of the massive Energiya-Buran project, developed as a countermeasure to the American Space Shuttle. NASA SP-2011-4110.

Author Biography

Boris Evseyevich Chertok was a prominent Soviet and Russian rocket designer, responsible for control systems of a number of ballistic missiles and spacecraft. Chertok was born in 1912 in Poland, and his family moved to Moscow when he was three years old. Academician Chertok began his career as an electrician in Moscow before joining the aircraft design bureau of Viktor Bolkhovitinov in 1934. In 1946, he joined the newly established NII-88 institute as head of the control systems department and worked hand-in-hand with famed Chief Designer Sergey Korolev. Chertok became one of Korolev's closest aides in developing control systems for ballistic missiles and spacecraft, eventually becoming deputy chief designer of the famous OKB-1, the design organization that spun off from NII-88 in 1956 and was responsible for a remarkable string of space firsts of the early Soviet space program. Chertok participated in every major project at OKB-1, now the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, until his retirement from active work in 1991. Among his many contributions to the Russian space industry, he was closely involved in the launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957 and the first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Following his retirement, Chertok served as a senior consultant at RSC-Energia and published a series of memoirs, "Rockets and People," chronicling the history of the Russian space program.