Rockets and People, Volume I, by Boris Chertok (Author), Asif Siddiqi (Editor), NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 2005. ISBN-10: 0160732395, ISBN-13: 978-0160732393.

Much has been written in the West on the history of the Soviet space program but few Westerners have read direct first-hand accounts of the men and women who were behind the many Russian accomplishments in exploring space.The memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, translated from the original Russian, fills that gap.

Chertok began his career as an electrician in 1930 at an aviation factory near Moscow.Twenty-seven years later, he became deputy to the founding figure of the Soviet space program, the mysterious “Chief Designer” Sergey Korolev. Chertok’s sixty-year-long career and the many successes and failures of the Soviet space program constitute the core of his memoirs, Rockets and People. In these writings, spread over four volumes, Academician Chertok not only describes and remembers, but also elicits and extracts profound insights from an epic story about a society’s quest to explore the cosmos.

In Volume 1, Chertok describes his early years as an engineer and ends with the mission to Germany after the end of World War II when the Soviets captured Nazi missile technology and expertise. Volume 2 takes up the story with the development of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and ends with the launch of Sputnik and the early Moon probes. In Volume 3, Chertok recollects the great successes of the Soviet space program in the 1960s including the launch of the world’s first space voyager Yuriy Gagarin as well as many events connected with the Cold War. Finally, in Volume 4, Chertok meditates at length on the massive Soviet lunar project designed to beat the Americans to the Moon in the 1960s, ending with his remembrances of the Energiya-Buran project.

Download Rockets and People, Volume I, Part One

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Download Rockets and People, Volume I, Part Two

Pdf format, 3mb, 344pages.

Download Rockets and People, Volume I, Part Three

Pdf format, 771kb, 60pages.

About the Author:

Boris Yevseyevich Chertok was born in 1912 in Poland and his family moved to Moscow when he was three years old. In 1930, he began work as an electrician in in the Fili suburb of Moscow. In 1934, he joined the design bureau of Viktor Bolkhovitinov, a noted designer of bombers. Under Bolkhovitinov, Chertok contributed to the evelopment of the DB-A long-range bomber and the first Soviet rocketplane launched under its own power, the “BI.” In 1945–46, Chertok played a key role in organizing and reconstructing plans to reproduce the German V-2 using Soviet materials.

In 1946, by a joint order of two ministries, Chertok was transferred from the aviation industry to the newly created head institute for rocket technology, the NII-88, where he was the deputy chief engineer and chief of the department of control systems. Chertok became one of Korolev’s closest aides in developing control systems for ballistic missiles and spacecraft, eventually becoming Deputy Chief Designer of the famous OKB-1, the design organization that spun off from NII-88 in 1956. Chertok participated in every major project at OKB-1 (now the Energiya Rocket-Space Corporation, RKK Energiya) until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1992 (at the age of 80) he moved from the position of Deputy General Designer of RKK Energiya to become the Chief Scientific Consultant.

At the present time, Academician Chertok lives in Moscow, and continues active work as the Chief Scientific Consultant for RKK Energiya, the dean of the Faculty for “Control Motion” at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute and also serves as Professor of MGTU and head of the Program on the History of Cosmonautics in the Russian Academy of Sciences. His four-volume memoirs Rakety i lyudi (Rockets and People) were published in Moscow between 1994 and 1999.

About the Editor:

Asif A. Siddiqi completed his Ph.D. in History from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-2000-4408, 2000), a watershed book on Soviet space history.

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