Chatter: The Harrowing History of the Soviet Space Program with John Strausbaugh
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
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Summary
In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started.
Strausbaugh’s new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth’s orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren’t quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space.
The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival.
Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include:
The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff
Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X
Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline
Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html
Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/
More about John Strausbaugh:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:16.4 | slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:31.0 | This is Chatter, I'm Shane Harris. This week, historian John Strasba on the harrowing history of the Soviet space program. |
| 0:54.8 | Early one morning these three half-starved small Soviet men in basically leisure suits looking like they were going on a cruise ship rather than a spaceship got into this thing got fired off and survived they actually orbited and came back down |
| 1:01.6 | alive and that says almost everything about the Soviet space program in those early years. |
| 1:07.0 | They were just brilliant and snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat. |
| 1:15.2 | There were a million reasons why that rocket should have failed, that Sputnik itself shouldn't |
| 1:19.6 | have worked, but the rocket didn't fail and Spin it did in fact work, and it was great news It is great to have you on our show. |
| 1:40.0 | It's great to be here. Thanks very much, she. |
| 1:42.0 | I am holding here your new book which comes out today when the podcast is airing. |
| 1:47.0 | The title alone was enough to make me just stop and say, okay, yeah yeah I want to read this the wrong stuff how the |
| 1:56.6 | Soviet space program crashed and burned if you needed more than that there's a |
| 2:02.1 | fantastic picture of a Soviet-era rocket going down towards the earth rather up with this guy, which is Portends to the theme of this book, obviously on the the fame title of the right stuff |
| 2:14.9 | about the US Mercury astronaut program of the famous Mercury 7 I love this book this is a |
| 2:21.7 | harrowing and hilarious account of a history that I will admit |
| 2:26.0 | as a space geek knew absolutely nothing about. I had long assumed that the space race of the 1950s and 60s was |
| 2:37.4 | pitting two kind of great superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, who were, if not necessarily always technologically |
| 2:45.7 | matched, probably sort of matched an engineering prowess and, you know, like basic concern |
| 2:50.1 | for the safety of the human beings they were sticking on top of these rockets? |
| 2:53.8 | Nope. Turns out not. This is a really fantastic history that is going to |
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