Boris Chertok, "Rockets and People", Volume I

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Boris Chertok, "Rockets and People", Volume I

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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. NASA SP-2005-4110.

About the Author
Boris Evseyevich Chertok was a prominent Soviet and Russian rocket designer, responsible for control systems of a number of ballistic missiles and spacecraft. Chertok was born in 1912 in Poland, and his family moved to Moscow when he was three years old. Academician Chertok began his career as an electrician in Moscow before joining the aircraft design bureau of Viktor Bolkhovitinov in 1934. In 1946, he joined the newly established NII-88 institute as head of the control systems department and worked hand-in-hand with famed Chief Designer Sergey Korolev. 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 and was responsible for a remarkable string of space firsts of the early Soviet space program. Chertok participated in every major project at OKB-1, now the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, until his retirement from active work in 1991. Among his many contributions to the Russian space industry, he was closely involved in the launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957 and the first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Following his retirement, Chertok served as a senior consultant at RSC-Energia and published a series of memoirs, "Rockets and People," chronicling the history of the Russian space program.