This Week’s Book Review - The Wrong Stuff


Looking for a good read? Here is a recommendation. I have an unusual approach to reviewing books. I review books I feel merit a review. Each review is an opportunity to recommend a book. If I do not think a book is worth reading, I find another book to review. You do not have to agree with everything every author has written (I do not), but the fiction I review is entertaining (and often thought-provoking) and the non-fiction contain ideas worth reading.

Book Review

How the Soviet Space Program Went Wrong

Reviewed by Mark Lardas
January 26, 2025

“The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned,” by John Strausbaugh, PublicAffairs, 2024, 272 pages, $30.00 (Hardcover), $18.99 (E-book), $19.49 (Audiobook)

Those growing up in the 1950s and 1960s knew about the Space Race. The US and Soviet Union were contending for mastery in the High Frontier. It looked like the Soviets were winning: first satellite in orbit, first animal in orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit. The US was hopelessly behind.

“The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned,” by John Strausbaugh reveals the reality. The Soviet Space program was a kludged mess. Its only goal through 1969 was one-upping the United States, doing what the US planned next in space before the US. It existed to troll the US.

The book’s opening skips to the Voskhod I mission – the first time a spacecraft launched multiple people into orbit. Its real goal was beating the US’s upcoming first Gemini flight, planned to place two men into space in late 1964. Khrushchev ordered rocket designer Sergei Korolev to put three men into orbit before then.

Korolev stripped a Vostok capsule, putting three couches that fit three very small cosmonauts. Weight limits meant they had to fly in street clothes, not space suits. The three passengers had to lose weight before flying. It used the one-man life support of the Vostok, limiting available oxygen, and with inadequate thermal control for three. Temperatures became sweltering. Its new landing system that failed when tested, destroying the test capsule. Everyone expected disaster. Miraculously everything worked, and the cosmonauts survived.

Strausbaugh shows this was typical. Sputnik 1 flew to beat out Explorer 1. Its only instrument was a radio transmitter – all Korolev could manage in the time available. Laika, the dog launched on Sputnik 2, died of overheating early in the mission. Gagarin’s first manned flight was done to beat out the upcoming Mercury suborbital flight. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space because a cover article in “Look” magazine implied NASA was considering women astronauts. (NASA was not. Tereshkova qualifications were she was a loyal Communist and expert parachutist.)

Unnecessary danger prevailed to achieve space firsts. Vostok had a design flaw which nearly killed Gagarin. Uncorrected, it caused similar problems on future flights. The airlock added for the first spacewalk mission was so badly designed the cosmonaut partially depressurized his spacesuit to reenter his spacecraft. On Soyuz 11 the crew was told to ignore a light warning the hatch was improperly sealed. They suffocated on reentry.

“The Wrong Stuff” is eye-opening. It reveals the Potemkin village nature of Soviet space, and the length the Soviets went to upstage the US. It is well worth reading.

Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com. This review appeared in a different form in Epoch Times.

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I am far from being an expert on this topic, but I recall being told that the radio transmitter was actually a clever device for providing information about then-unknown features of the ionosphere, and for providing tracking information on the then-unknown rate of orbital decay – a deliberate first step into the unknown.

There is no doubt that the USSR’s space program took risks that NASA in its heyday avoided. On the other hand, later-NASA took giant risks with astronauts lives during the Space Shuttle era. Maybe the author of this book was a little harsh?

NASA - NSSDCA - Spacecraft - Details

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Thank you for the book recommendation and the review.

I can add that english translation of “Rockets and People” by Boris Chertok is available on NASA website here:
Rockets and People - NASA

It is a fascinating story of the Soviet space and missile programs starting from about 1945 with a hunt for the German missile parts and going all the way to the Moon. Also worth a read.

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The subtext here, of course, is the extent to which government entities become willing to abandon all their principles - even first principles - in order to conform with political directives (or the appearance thereof). I don’t know about in the USSR, but in the USSA, such political directives from above have become largely unnecessary. That’s because the ‘long march through the institutions’ installed leftist ideologues in all the necessary permanent positions - the apparatus at NASA included. O-rings, schmo-rings. Unfortunately for the crew (and the taxpayers) here was a case of competence signaling which revealed the truth of the matter in a manner which could not be covered up by the compliant media. Also unfortunately, the political apparatus (the deep state”) of the USSA (hopefully soon to delete the ‘S’ which stands for ‘socialist’) includes the MSM, which continuously lies (by commission and omission) to maintain the multi-dimensional illusions created/maintained by leftist virtue signaling. Were they actually a media, they would gleefully tell us when such virtuous intent didn’t quite work out - as they do whenever trying to malign any conservative person, place, principle, thing or idea. Example: the triumphalist, swooning glee when Trump was impeached or indicted (neglecting to report the partisan incoherence at work).

Case in point, the “media” downplayed the initial strong objections to use of SRB’s as inherently unsafe for human flight.

Having been around and interested at the time, I recall some strong criticism of their use and the eventual choice to use them - during debates about Congressional funding - was to save money. Should it surprise me that I can’t find any mention of that criticism when I search for it today? I note that neither SpaceX nor the Soviets used them, relying only upon liquid fuel propulsion for human space flight.

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No. It was just a radio transmitter. Yes, you could track orbital decay with it post-facto, but much of that was done by western scientists. It was just a stunt.

I don’t think the author was being harsh. After Challenger NASA made changes to make things safer. They made even more changes after Columbia. The Shuttle was a flawed spacecraft, but those flaws were not obvious if the vehicle was flown within its limits.

That is not to say NASA did not let politics sway it during the Shuttle program. They did. Challenger should not have launched when it did due to temperature constraints, which NASA management ignored. Had they waited until it was warmer, they would have had a successful launch. Ditto with Columbia. In both cases NASA ignored launch safety criteria they had set earlier.

The Soviet program simply did not have any concerns about safety. Gargarin nearly died because of a design flaw in the Vostok capsule. It could easily have been corrected, but wasn’t. It ended up killing Komarov on a later mission. Similarly the Voskhod cosmonauts nearly died of heat exhaustion - rather like the way Laika did die. And three Cosmonauts suffocated because their spaceship’s hatch wasn’t sealed properly when they undocked from an early space station.

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Clearly, I need to read the book. Thanks for the recommendation!

Certainly, things were different in the USSR than they were in the USA of that day. Both places have changed substantially since the days of the International Geophysical Year – one for the better, one for the worse.

But to get back to the flawed Space Shuttle – one of the most interesting tales I have read on that topic was that the Soviets could not understand what the US was doing. They ran their own numbers, and concluded that the Shuttle would be a more expensive way of getting into space, not a cheaper way as promised by the Usual Suspects.

Since the Soviets at that stage believed the US was in the lead technologically, they eventually built their own shuttle to find out where was the cost saving which the Americans had recognized and they had missed. This shuttle (the Buran) made one unmanned flight – confirming that the Soviet analysis was correct and the US analysis was moonshine.

If only NASA had put its resources behind truly reusable technology like the Delta Clipper X (abandoned in the 1990s), we could have had the performance of SpaceX about 3 decades ago. But was the NASA of the 1980s/1990s already too far gone?

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Delta Clipper was DoD initially - when it worked. Then due to political finagling, it was given to NASA. The first thing NASA did was break it. The second thing was to say, “see, it didn’t work, just like we predicted.” The third thing NASA did was to abandon it.

I was there back then. Yep. NASA was too far gone. That’s why I left space in 1994, swearing never to return. (Never lasted until 2002, when circumstances forced me back to the Shuttle program. That’s another story.)

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I hope you tell that story, some day, perhaps. You’ve hinted at parts of Artemis that sound interesting.

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It will have to wait until I have retired from JSC. I am dumb, but not stupid, I have a job on Lunar Gateway that is actually fun, and don’t want to make too many waves. Ask me after September 2027.

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An important distinction, indeed :smile:. It brings up another good read: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla:

Intelligent, Bandit, Helpless & Stupid:

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Totally different question Seawriter. ?Did you ever know an astronaut named Paco Lockhart. He flew several space missions, then went back to weapons development.

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No. The only astronauts I knew personally were Karl Henize (a friend of my father in law) and Pinky Nelson (through the amateur astronomy society we both belonged to).

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The subtitle is also misleading. There was neither crashing nor burning, at least among the stories mentioned in the review of the book. Risks (perhaps excessive), yes but no spectacular failures. And let’s not forget the burning (albeit no crashing) of Apollo 1.

Any pioneering venture is risky. The Oregon Trail was risky. One man’s unnecessary risk is another’s calculated risk. The Soviets were in a hot race with the West, not attending a garden party with tea sandwiches. The idea was to win. Both sides pushed hard.

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Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee burned on the launch pad because NASA underestimated the risks of a pure oxygen atmosphere.

Hindsight is 20/20 and people make mistakes. It doesn’t necessarily follow that, in either case, an unnecessary risk was taken.

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Correct.

The world first scientific space experiment was carried out in 1957 during the flight of the First Artificial Earth Satellite (AES) – Sputnik-1 . It was an ionospheric experiment performed at IZMIRAN under the direction of Prof. Ya.L. Alpert (1911–2010).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117715001623

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The question really isn’t the taking of risks; you quite appropriately point out different people view risk differently. The difference to me was that we made mistakes about things we didn’t know while the Russians made mistakes out of carelessness - or perhaps a disregard for the welfare of their astronauts (but that last might just be a bias of mine)

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