Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon

I regret never having picked up this book before. This is far more than a bio of an unknown space pioneer. It is a clear history of the early space efforts in general, American failures placed in line against confirmable Soviet failures. Indeed they had their training fatalities as we did. Early rocket tests blew up on the launch pad as did ours (though our engineers had the sense to stand back from the pad). Korolev's genius was as a manager, conceiving designs, selling them to party bosses (not really that different from selling them to U.S. Congress) and realizing many of them on a shoestring budget with sometimes unsophisticated materiel (e.g. the Soviet system initially eschewed the use of computers and calculations were often made in laborious longhand). Ultimately they could not match us in the area of fine control. They could have sent a man to the moon as early as 1966, but bringing him back was another matter. They could not see the P.R. value of a one-way trip (a fact which is the takeoff point for a great post-Soviet work,satirizing the Cosmonaut program, "Omon Ra" by Viktor Pelevin). But how many people recall that Gemini 8 & 9 nearly ended in fatal disasters? This book offers a concise review of the dueling programs, free of ideology.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was pure genius. Largely unknown in his time and now largely forgotten, Korolev was the chief designer of the Russian space program. He designed and developed the Russian ICBM R7 rocket, Sputnik -- the first Earth-orbiting satellite, Vostok -- the first spacecraft which carried Yuri Gagarin around the Earth, and began the design of the Soyuz spacecraft -- the workhorse still in use today as transit to the International Space Station. Hartford's book is a must read for anyone wanting to learn about Korolev. His story may surprise you. The journey of a young flying enthusiast, his imprisonment and sentencing to a gulag preceded his slow rise to the stars. An excellent book, thoroughly researched and well written make for a well-informed, even riveting, biography well worth the reading. Most highly recommended.

Excellent biography of the Soviet rocket development leader of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s pretty much a story of “poor but smart boy, arrested and sent to the GULAG on a trumped-up charge, makes good, becoming the de-facto leader of one of the largest Soviet military industrial organizations that ever existed.” I thought that the most interesting chapters were 12, 13, and 15. Chapter 12 discusses the some of the organizational, administrative, and industrial features of the Soviet rocket and space programs of the 1940s through the 1960s and occasionally compares the Soviet activities with the American NASA program. One subject that I found especially interesting was the comparison of the US and Soviet industrial and technological capabilities at the end of World War II in 1945 and 1946, when the Soviet rocket program began. At the end of WW II, the US was the word leader in the areas of radio communications and navigation, radar, computers, and aviation manufacturing. The Soviets had nothing comparable and had to create entire industries, scientific research institutes, and engineering design organizations from scratch. They also had to establish university level scientific and engineering schools and industrial manufacturing vocational schools. There is also discussion throughout several chapters (especially 12 and 13) on the relative efficiencies of the US and Soviet industrial economies, especially those aspects related to the rockets and space programs of the two countries. At their peaks in the mid to late 1960s, the Soviet rocket and space sector probably had around 800,000 people while the US had a little over 400,000. Considering that the US achieved a moon landing and the Soviets did not, it would appear that the Soviet rocket / space industry labor force was no more than half as efficient as the US labor force. Since the collapse of USSR in the early 1990s, much archival material on the former Soviet economy has become available. I have read in other books published over the past 20 years that generally estimate that an average Soviet industrial worker was about 1/3 as efficient or productive as a US industrial worker and a Soviet agricultural worker was perhaps 1/5 as productive as a US agricultural worker or farmer. So it would seem to be consistent that the high-priority Soviet rocket and space programs were ½ as efficient as the US equivalent. Chapters 15 and 17 discuss the reasons why the Soviets were unable to land men on the moon ahead of the Americans and why they eventually just gave up such a mission entirely. Essentially, their overall industrial and technological backwardness finally caught up with them. Many of the early successes, such as Sputniks 1 through 3 and the early manned space missions, were really political prestige projects so people like Khrushchev could boast of the superiority of communism over capitalism. There were also a huge number of failures in the form of rocket launching failures, radio and telemetry failures, and satellite communications failures that were never publicized. There are also some incredible descriptions of how the Soviets achieved what they did. For example, the Soviet scientists and engineers in the 1950s and even into the 1960s generally had no access to computers or in many cases even mechanical adding machines. There are stories of how young Soviet engineers would perform complex trajectory and ballistic calculations by multiplying six-digit trigonometric sine and cosine values by other 6-digit numbers by hand! The calculations would take weeks, even months, to perform. Chapter 13 describes the relatively simple Soviet technology compared to what the Americans were accustomed to. Soviet manufacturing quality control was primitive. Electrical circuits and entire satellites were constructed by hand soldering and welding and polishing. The Soviets apparently understood in general the requirements for clean construction, but had no concept of the clean rooms used by NASA in satellite construction. The Soviets also apparently performed nowhere near the level of component and overall systems testing that American contractors and NASA performed. In my opinion, a more extensive book on the Soviet rocket and space flight story is “Rockets and People, Volume 2 – Creating a Rocket Industry” by Boris Chertok. That book tells the story of the entire Soviet complex or system that developed and produced the rockets, guided missiles, space capsules, satellites, and lunar and planetary probes. There is also some side discussion on the Soviet atomic bomb and thermonuclear weapons programs involving Sakharov, Kurchatov, and Keldysh. Harford’s book is similar to Chertok’s in that it discusses the bureaucracies and management structures that evolved during the 1950s and 1960s, the design bureaus (OKBs), scientific research institutes (NIIs), Ministries, Council of Ministers State Scientific Committees, political leaders and their roles, and industrial ministries and organizations. But it doesn’t provide the level of detail on the administrative and industrial structure that Chertok’s book provides. Chertok’s book includes much description of the old USSR industrial, research, and organizational structure that evolved to become the military industrial complex that eventually was administered overall by the Military Industrial Committee (VPK). The Chertok book also describes the organizational changes that occurred over time as the various NIIs, OKBs, Ministries, and so forth were split into separate entities, combined into single all-encompassing organizations, and so forth. For an additional story of the development of the Soviet anti-aircraft and ABM missile systems, I recommend the book “Intercept 1961 – The Birth of Soviet Missile Defense” by Gruntman (2015). It is an excellent account of the development of those missile systems from the 1940s and 1950s through the 1980s. Similar to Harford’s and Chertok’s books, it’s a detailed history of the entire background to what the Soviets did to accomplish that item. There is also extensive technical discussion of how the Soviets solved the theoretical, research, and engineering problems involved in developing the necessary missiles, tracking and scanning radars, communication systems, and computer systems. There is also much information on what the Americans knew about all this by means of radio and telemetry eavesdropping from secret bases in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The book contains numerous photos from American U-2 overflights from 1956 - 1960 and from the early spy satellites such as Corona and Big Bird. There is also information on related Soviet ICBM and IRBM missile programs and their associated organization leaders such as Yangel and Cholomei And for a really good book on the magnitude and national economic influence of the Soviet military industrial complex (MIC), I suggest reading the book “The Price of the Past -- Russia’s Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy” by Gaddy (1996). It describes the history of the Soviet military industry from the 1930s through the eventual collapse of the USSR in the 1980s and 1990s. There is considerable detail on the function of the Military Industrial Committee (VPK) and it's subordinate industrial ministries. The best part of the book is the discussion on how the military industry (which included the space and rocket programs) really accomplished its function and the economic consequences. Essentially, it plundered the civilian economic sector with impunity. Massive forced subsidies and hidden costs were just part of the game. The book provides plenty of statistics on the extent of the MIC in terms of labor, investment, and influence of the MIC on the Soviet economy and the society in general.

If you are not familiar with the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union from 1946-1969, this book would bore you. If you have a degree of familiarity with the subject, this tome will fascinate you. Harford does a fabulous job in his depiction of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the "Chief Designer" of the Soviet space program. He was able to interview several of the engineers and designers who worked under Korolev (who died in 1969), shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. By utilizing these rare oral histories from the actual participants, mixed with his review of archival documentation and his knowledge in rocketry, he weaves together a fact-based account of the life of one of the most important people in the history of the space race. If there is a detriment to the book it would be that his technical expertise comes in during discussions of rockets and rocket engines. Without prior knowledge of the intricacies of rocket dynamics, the information becomes meaningless to the reader. Having an extensive interest and curiosity into the space race, and with having read numerous volumes on the topic prior to picking this book up, I rate it five-stars.

James Harford has done a great job in putting this book together. It has taken him many years to do this. It is a well written and a well researched book. This book tells the story of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev who was the Mastermind behind the Soviet space program. There are a lot of interviews with people who worked with him and new him. It gives you a really good look at this great Man. It also gives you a good history lesson of the soviet space program. I would highly recommend this book if you are interested in the history of space. If you want some inspiration in life of what one man can do then this is a great read.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolyev was the "chief designer" responsible for the development of the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and artificial earth satellite (Sputnik 1). The authoritative biography of Sergei Pavlovich must probably await a translation from the Russian. More technical detail is required beyond what is available in Hartford's book. Still, the present volume is the best current study of Korolyev available in English. The book is more than adequate for a popular readership but will occasionally annoy the professional with errors like the one on page 255 where Hartford claims that the Soyuz reentry capsule is spherical and the orbital module is bell-shaped. The opposite is true. I also felt there was a bit too much speculation mixed in with the historical fact.

The author has done an incredible job of painting a verbal portrait of one of the world's most invisible men. The secrecy in which Korolev was cloaked during his lifetime by the Soviet government makes a really good biography far beyond the reach of any author/historian lacking access to Korolev's contemporaries. Here, however, Harford has with great effort and painstaking detail given us the benefit of the recollections of many people with first-hand knowledge. Moreover, he has done so by relating these recollections within the context of the technological dreams, challenges and successes of the world's rocket and space pioneers, the space race between the USSR and USA, secret Soviet bureaucracies and party controls, and the intense pressures bearing down upon this driven man, once imprisoned within a gulag but ultimately elevated to Hero status. This is great history and a great book.

Many books have been written on the American side of the Space Race. However this author has looked at how the Russians were able to beat the Americans for so long. He has used many good resources and interviews to give a balanced and deep look at the rise and continuing work, until the death of Korolev. He was really the Russian space program.