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

Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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