Space Race; The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union For Dominion of Space

New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006. First U.S. Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Very good. xii, 370, [2] pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Ink marks and highlighting noted. Deborah Cadbury is a British author, historian and television producer with the BBC. She has won many international awards for her documentaries including an Emmy Award. Cadbury joined the BBC in 1978 as a trainee.[citation needed] She went on to produce films for the BBC's Horizon strand and won awards for her investigations. Her Horizon film, Assault on the Male, launched a worldwide scientific research campaign into environmental oestrogens, hormone-mimicking chemicals potentially impacting human health, and led to her book, The Feminization of Nature. She moved into history programming in 2003 as the series producer of the BAFTA-nominated drama documentary series, Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. The series was notable for combining live action with CGI, created by Gareth Edwards, and was described as "a ground breaking achievement" by the Times. In 2005 she produced the docudrama series, Space Race, the BBC's first co-production between Russia and the United States with unique access to the Russian side of the story. As an executive producer, Cadbury continued her investigation of Cold War espionage in her BBC series Nuclear Secrets, which explored the race for supremacy through pivotal personal stories of such nuclear scientists as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Andrei Sakharov. The story of the race into space is marked by the greatest superpower rivalries, political paranoia, and technological feats of the twentieth century. But until now, we have known only half the story. With the end of the cold war, decades of secrets have been exposed, bringing with them a remarkable opportunity: the unmasking of the true heroes and villains behind one of the most exciting races in history. At the center of this exhilarating, fast-paced account are Wernher von Braun, the camera-friendly former Nazi scientist who led the American rocket design team, and Sergei Korolev, the chief Soviet designer and former political prisoner whose identity was a closely guarded state secret. These rivals were opposite in every way, save for one: each was obsessed by the idea of launching a man to the Moon. Korolev told his wife, "In every century men were looking into the sky and dreaming. And now I'm close to the greatest dream of mankind." In attempting to fulfill this dream, Korolev was initially hampered by a budget so small that his engineers were forced to repurpose cardboard boxes as drafting tables. Von Braun, meanwhile, was eventually granted almost limitless access to funds by an American government panicked at the thought that their cold war enemy might take the lead in the exploration of space. Korolev, whose family life was destroyed by his long sentence in the Gulag, was constantly aware that any false move would finish his career or even his life. His rival, on the other hand, enjoyed remarkable celebrity in America and was even the subject of a 1960 biopic. In this extraordinary book, Deborah Cadbury combines sheer adventure and nail-biting suspense with a moving portrayal of the space race's human dimension. Using source materials never before seen, she reveals that the essential story of the cold war is a mind-bending voyage beyond the bounds of the Earth, one marked by espionage, ambition, ingenuity, and passion.