David Whitehouse - One small step: the inside story of space exploration

New York London

2009 by David Whitehouse

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For my late father-in-law Bernard Carey. With thanks.

Soviet rockets must conquer space!

19031957

Man will conquer space soon

19571958

I can see the clouds, everything. Its beautiful

19591961

Lets go and get the job done

19611962

Gagarin in a skirt

19621963

Friends! Before us is the Moon

19641965

They want you to get back in

19641965

Theyre in a roll and it wont stop

19651966

Were on fire! Get us out of here!

19671968

That was a real kick in the pants

1968

Apollo 8, youre go for TLI

1968

Were actually going to fly something like this?

1969

We is down among em Charlie

1969

Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed

1969

Houstonweve had a problem

1969

I cried a little

19701971

Ten to 15 seconds of agonizing consciousness

1971 AND 1973

Their majesty overwhelmed me

19711972

Theres something on the telemetry that doesnt look quite right

19731974

We actually came to have a very close relationship with the Soviet crew

1975

Hey, theres some tiles missing back there

1981

It marks our entrance into a new era

19821983

You could see the Sun lighting the desert way up ahead

1984

The most important thing for us was to dock

19851986

Uh oh

1986

My God, thats a lot of damage

1988 AND BEYOND

Its serious. Its serious

19942001

Off-scale low

2003

Largest structure in space

1998

The flight was spectacular

2004

INDEX

An American president lays down a challenge to his nation that he will never live to see fulfilled. A Russian despot curses his rocket engineers and urges them to greater effort. A giant rocket explodes in a deadly fireball seconds after liftoff, ending the lives of those on board and the dreams of those watching on the ground. One moonwalker takes mankinds first steps on another world, while another writes his daughters name in the lunar dust. A German SS soldier dreams of space, while at the same time a prisoner digs a grave in a Soviet death camp, never thinking that he will ever see space travellet alone be one of its key pioneers. A crew of astronauts come close to a lonely death on their journey to the Moon. Another crew, at another time, know they will never reach home again.

These are just a few of the multitude of momentous events that have come to symbolize our enduring fascination with space travel and space exploration. When do such events become legends? When does our history turn to something more than merely moments in time? How long does it take for us to appreciate the true significance of the times we have lived through? Without doubt, when the history of the 20th century is written, one of its the major landmarks will be the journey into space. In many years to come, when much of todays modern history will be footnotes, Sputnik, Gagarin, Armstrong and his one small step will still be headlines. Across the growing centuries future historians will look upon the 20th century as the time when things changed forever, the time when mankind left its home planet and ventured out but a short distance into space. When, for a while, we achieved greatness.

Strange then that it is a story so few know in any detail. In schools we teach the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo and Amundsen, but seldom the greater voyages of Gagarin, Borman, Lovell or Anders, or even those of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.

There are many threads that can be drawn through the story of the astronauts, and each time the story is told, it is a slightly different weave. This is one story about the great things spacemen and space women have done for us; of the way they wrote history. Dreams and tragedies, pride and mourning, conflict and immortalityall are intertwined in the story of mankinds steps in space. It is not just a technological tale of rockets, satellites and spaceships. It is much more a story of special human beings overcoming all obstacles and setbacks to fulfill their dreams and the dreams of others. It is, I believe, our greatest story, and it is best told in the words of those who were there.

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to meet many astronauts, cosmonauts and others involved in this great adventure, and they have been kind enough to share their stories with me. I am also indebted to NASA for its extensive history program that is a rich source of interviews, analysis and technical data.

David Whitehouse

REALIZING THE DREAM

WERNHER VON BRAUN AND SERGEI KOROLEV
19031957

In the 20th century it finally began to seem that Mankinds long-held vision of traveling in space could become a reality. Yet despite the peaceful ambitions of the early pioneers of rocketry and space flight, the technology needed for such an event was developed initially to produce weapons of war.

First there were the dreamers, then came the practical men and women, and finally the voyagers themselves. The origin of the space programs of the 20th century can perhaps be traced back to the late 1800s and the ideas of a deaf, self-educated Russian school teacher called Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. Born in 1857, his writings, frequently visionary if sometimes far-fetched, put substance to mankinds nascent dreams of escaping from our planet and journeying into the cosmos. He wrote of multistage rocket boosters and space stations orbiting the Earth. It was Tsiolkovsky, along with the later generation of rocket pioneers, the American Robert Goddard and the German Hermann Oberth, who prepared the way for what followed. But while all three dreamed of space travel, only Tsiolkovsky thought it would never come to pass.