The Red Rocket´s Glare

Sobre el libro The Red Rocket´s Glare de Asif A. Siddiqi publicado por Cambridge UP al 2013:

Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957
The Red Rockets´ Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering - seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate line between secret work on rockets (which interested the military) and public prognostications on the cosmos (which captivated the populace). Sputnik, he argues, was the outcome of both large-scale state imperatives to harness science and technology and populist phenomena that frequently owed little to the whims and needs of the state apparatus.
• The first academic work to use declassified archival sources to revisit the birth of the Soviet space program and, particularly, the origins of the Sputnik satellite • Situates the origins of the Soviet space program in the social and cultural upheavals of 20th-century Russia
• Takes a unique approach to the history of science by connecting Soviet cultural enthusiasm for the cosmos with engineering work to build rockets, and by showing how the two processes were inseparable