Thirteen years ago, BBC filmmaker Jamie Doran and I began an extraordinary journey into the heart of the early Soviet space program. We told Western audiences something of what really happened in the lead up to Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space. So far as we recall, by the late 1990s only Jim Oberg’s excellent “Red Star in Orbit” had broached similar ground for a mass-market book audience in the West (and James Harford’s authoritative English-language biography of Sergei Korolev, first published in 1997, was also essential reading). We explained, to British audiences unfamiliar with the details of Soviet rocketry, that the Moon race was never, as so many people imagined, a “done deal,” with NASA as the inevitable winners. Apollo 8 was sent to the Moon on an accelerated schedule because NASA chiefs had good reason to fear that Russia might, perhaps, succeed in a manned circumlunar mission, even if its more ambitious landing projects were not likely to win the race to the lunar surface.
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