Rockets and People, Volume I; NASA SP-200504110

Washington DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA History Division, Office of External Relations, 2005. Presumed first edition/first printing thus. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxix, [1], 402 pages. DJ has a tear at top front. Footnotes. Illustrations. Index. Preface to the English Language Edition. Foreword by Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, USAF (Ret.). A few notes about Transliteration and translation. List of Abbreviations. Boris Evseyevich Chertok (1 March 1912 - 14 December 2011) was a prominent Soviet and Russian rocket designer, responsible for control systems of a number of ballistic missiles and spacecraft. He was the author of a four-volume book Rockets and People, the definitive source of information about the history of the Soviet space program. From 1974, he was the deputy chief designer of the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, the space aircraft designer bureau which he started working for in 1946. He retired in 1992. Between 1994 and 1999 Boris Chertok, with support from his wife Yekaterina Golubkina, created the four-volume book series about the history of the Soviet space industry. The series was originally published in Russian, in 1999. Much has been written in the West 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, translated from the original Russian, fills that gap. Chertok began his career as an electrician in 1930 at an aviation factory near Moscow. Twenty-seven years later, he became deputy to the founding figure of the Soviet space program, the mysterious Chief Designer Sergey Korolev. Chertok's sixty-year-long career and the many successes and failures of the Soviet space program constitute the core of his memoirs, Rockets and People. In these writings, spread over four volumes, Academician Chertok not only describes and remembers, but also elicits and extracts profound insights from an epic story about a society's quest to explore the cosmos. In Volume 1, Chertok describes his early years as an engineer and ends with the mission to Germany after the end of World War II when the Soviets captured Nazi missile technology and expertise This memoir by a towering figure in Soviet/Russian space history was originally published in Russian and has now been specially translated and edited for publication in the NASA History Series. This book is the first of four volumes of Chertok's insightful reminiscences on his 60-year career in aviation and space. This book was edited by Asif Siddiqi, a historian of Russian space exploration, and General Tom Stafford contributed a foreword touching upon his significant work with the Russians on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Overall, this book contributes much new material to the literature about the Soviet space program.