English

Rockets and People

As with Volume I, Boris Chertok has extensively revised and expanded the material in Volume II from the original Russian text. In this volume, Chertok takes up his life story after his return from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1946. At the time, Stalin had ordered the foundation of the postwar missile program at an old artillery factory northeast of Moscow. Chertok gives an unprecedented view into the early days of the Soviet missile program. During this time, the new rocket institute known as NII-88 mastered V-2 technology and then quickly outgrew German technological influence by developing powerhl new missiles such as the R-2, the R-5M, and eventually the majestic R-7, the world s first intercontinental ballistic missile. With a keen talent for combining technical and human interests, Chertok writes of the origins and creation of the Baykonur Cosmodrome in a remote desert region of Kazakhstan. He devotes a substantial portion of Volume I1 to describing the launch of the first Sputnik satellite and the early lunar and interplanetary probes designed under legendary Chief Designer Sergey Korolev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He ends with a detailed description of the famous R

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