San Antonio College Library

Starting just after World War II, using rockets intended to deliver nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union took an early lead in the space race. Led by Chief Designer Sergei Korolev and braving the risks of unproven technology, Soviet cosmonauts beat their American rivals to achieve a series of firsts: Sputnik, the first man in space, the first woman in space, and the first spacewalk.

Cold War Space Sleuths reads like a Cold War espionage novel, but the reality of the story about the dedicated amateur observers bent on finding out about Soviet spaceflight during the Cold War is just as exciting and absorbing. Told in the sleuth's own words, each chapter unfolds a piece of the hidden history of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Coming from all over the world, including Russia itself, the amateur spies give first-hand accounts...

This book tells the story of the most exciting and challenging years in spaceflight, with two superpowers engaged in a titanic struggle to land one of their own people on the moon. Drawing on interviews with astronauts, cosmonauts, their families, technicians, and scientists, as well as rarely seen Soviet and American government documents, the authors craft a story of the golden age of spaceflight as both an intimate human experience and a global...

The behind-the-scenes story of the fierce battles on earth that launched the superpowers into space. Khrushchev was frustrated at America's U-2 spy plane, which flew too high to be shot down. But Russia's chief rocket designer, had an answer: an artificial satellite that would orbit the earth and cross American skies at will. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, stunned the world. Sputnik set in motion events that led not only to the moon landing...

This video clip contains footage of Yuri Gagarin training (2/16/61, Swjosdny Gorodok, U.S.S.R.) and an HW-2 rocket launch (10/6/32, Baltijsk, U.S.S.R.).

An account of the first year of the space race describes the dramatic rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and how it was marked by such contributing factors as UFO sightings, intelligence gathering, and fierce nationalism.

This is the journey of Laika, the abandoned puppy destined to become Earth's first space traveler. With the blending of fact and fiction, this story intertwines three compelling lives. Along with Laika, there is Korolev, a driven engineer at the top of the Soviet space program and Yelena, the lab technician responsible for Laika's health and life.

At the dawn of the space age, technological breakthroughs in Earth orbit flight were both breathtaking feats of ingenuity and disturbances to a delicate global balance of power. In this short book, aerospace historian Roger D. Launius concisely and engagingly explores the driving force of this era: the race to the Moon. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and closing with the end of the Apollo program in 1972, Launius examines how...

Stephanie Nolen heard a story about Jerrie Cobb, and she couldn't let it go: Cobb, a world-record-setting pilot and a woman, was recruited in 1959 to take the astronaut tests. At the time, the United States was losing the space race. The Soviets had larger, more powerful rockets, and engineers at NASA thought women -- smaller and lighter -- might be the answer to their problems. Women were also thought to be more tolerant of isolation and pain. Randy...