Russia’s original space program nearly killed cosmonauts with crazy blunders and amateur tech
nypost.comThe “space race” of the 1950s and 60s conjures images of the gleaming Sputnik satellite, Soviet scientists in crisp white coats and sharp-nosed rockets rising into the sky with fiery splendor.
But, the reality of the USSR’s space program — which narrowly beat the US to send the first man to space — was far more down-to-earth writes John Strausbaugh in his new book, “The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned” (out now, PublicAffairs).
Strausbaugh paints an amusing portrait of rockets and spacecrafts held together with little more than bubblegum and shoe strings — and tight-lipped publicity campaigns.
In this excerpt, he writes of Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut sent into space. On the morning of April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin fell out of the sky onto a quilt of farmland growing wheat and rye in the Russian village of Smelovka.
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