Review: The Wrong Stuff

by Jeff Foust
Monday, September 9, 2024

The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned
by John Strausbaugh
PublicAffairs, 2024
hardcover, 272 pp.
ISBN 978-1-5417-0334-6
US$30.00

On Wednesday, a Soyuz rocket is scheduled to lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, sending the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft to the International Space Station. It is a routine crew rotation mission to the station, but the launch itself is not: it will be just the tenth orbital launch so far this year by Russia. China has performed four times as many launches this year and the United States about ten times as many. Russia is on a pace for its lowest launch total in decades this year.

Russia has had its share of triumphs in space, like its string of firsts in the early years of the Age, but also tragedies and tribulations. In The Wrong Stuff, John Strausbaugh argues that the Soviet space program of the 1960s in particular should be remembered more for its failures than its successes.

The book seeks to be a condensed history of the Soviet/Russian space program, starting from its postwar origins developing rockets as ballistic missiles, although the primary focus (particularly after discussing Sputnik) is on the Soviet human space program in the 1960s. Those missions racked up an impressive series of firsts, but also flirted with disaster many times in a manner Strausbaugh suggests was reckless.

If you’re familiar with that era of Soviet space history, you won’t find much new in this book. That’s because, in large part, Strausbaugh relies on secondary sources like other history books on the era, based on the slender two-page bibliography; the closest things to primary sources are Boris Chertok’s Rockets and People and Yuri Gagarin’s autobiography. The book also lacks images, endnotes, and even an index, strangely enough.

Without new insights into the Soviet space program, the purpose of the book appears to be to summarize and synthesize what others have written. It is also, it seems, intended to sensationalize: the book goes into great detail about the drinking and sexual escapades of Russian cosmonauts, for example. That approach extends to the writing style, where Strausbaugh says that Khrushchev was “jonesing” for another chance to “troll the Americans” with another space first. And the program’s chief designer, Sergei Korolev, didn’t just snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with one mission, he “pried open the jaws of Defeat, stuck his head in, reached all the way down Defeat’s throat, and yanked out Victory.” One is surprised he didn’t kick Defeat in the shins as well.

There are also some odd errors in the book. In the chapter talking about Valentina Tereshkova’s flight, he references America’s “Mercury 13” and claims that none of them went to space: Wally Funk, he argues, did not go to space on a Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital flight in 2021 because it “peaked at about seventy-six kilometers, shy of the one hundred kilometers conventionally considered the edge of space.” That flight, in fact, reached an altitude of 107 kilometers, well above the Kármán Line. Late in the book, he claims that a Kazakh businessman named Dauren Musa owned the Baikonur Cosmodrome and that the Russians paid rent to him. Musa instead claims to own an abandoned Buran shuttle there (although it is true that he reportedly offered to hand it over to Roscosmos in exchange for the skull of a 19th century Kazakh leader.)

If you are completely unfamiliar with the history of the Soviet/Russian human spaceflight program, The Wrong Stuff will at least provide you with an introduction, particularly of its early history. If you’re reading this publication, though, that’s likely not the case; the book may instead fail to make it off the launch pad, with few novel insights about either the program’s past or its uncertain future.

Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.

Home