Soviet Rocket Technology

Abstract

space technology, irrespective of whether it agrees or disagrees with numerous existing books, pamphlets, articles, and rumors on subject. In June 1959, I received, from an influential Western (not British) organization, an invitation to testify before a powerful constitutional body and in press that Soviet Sputniks, Laikas, Luniks, etc., were no more than rude Communist propaganda -a Big Red Lie. A few months later, while looking at capsule of Mercury Project at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri, a well known scientist and educator said to me: Well, here we have something new, real, and outstanding, while Russians make only propaganda announcements. Then, in April, 1961, a few hours after Major Gagarin's successful re-entry and landing in USSR when I refused to give Yes and No answers, my interviewer in a Los Angeles hotel stated boldly that the so-called Gargarin's Space Flight, too, may well prove to be another hoax. Finally, in a document (in front of me as I write) prepared for official use, a Western intellectual advises his superiors that, according to results of his first-hand study, and other Eastern Slavonic nations appear to be much less inventive and imaginative in science and technology than Anglo-Saxon nations. I could enlist dozens of publications, radio broadcasts, and even TV plays, in which cold war sergeants, some of them known as Russian experts, depict Soviet Union as old Tsarist Russia with its notorious longbearded Muzhiks and Oblomov-like intellectuals, with no real scientific and technological progress.