Russian Rocketry

124 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ten years. It could be more solid, but it is aimed at the lay reader. It nevertheless provides a good starting point in reading for anyone inter­ ested in the American SST project. And that person will be grateful to the author for being thoughtful enough to document his text. Richard K. Smith* Russian Rocketry: A Historical Survey. By I. A. Slukhai. Translated from the Russian by the NASA and NSF-Israel Program for Scien­ tific Translation. Washington, D.C., 1967. Pp. 149, illustrations. The Russians, more than any other people, have shown a continuous interest in the development of rocketry since its first successful military uses in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29 and (by the British) in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1849, in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), a rocket institute was founded in which the design and development of rockets for military and civil uses were studied energetically. The vast improvement in artillery and the science of ballistics in the latter part of the nineteenth century did not entirely extinguish these efforts in Russia as it did in other Western countries, although in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 and in World War I, rockets were used by the Russians only for illumination. Russian interest in rocketry received a further impulse in the early 1900’s when Tsiolkovsky, with his rocket dynamics, and Meshchersky, with his mechanics of bodies of varying mass, laid the theoretical foundations of interplanetary flight for which rockets were the only suitable means of propulsion. Tsiolkovsky’s proposals for liquid-fuel rockets with fuel feed pumps foreshadowed the design features of the practical rockets which appeared 30-40 years later. As a result of the work of Tsiolkov­ sky, and later of F. A. Tsander in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Russian rocketry was taken up again seriously. Both solid- and liquid-fuel rockets were developed at the newly established institutes GDL (Gas Dynamics Lab­ oratory) and GIRD (Jet Propulsion Study Group). One of these de­ velopments was an air-to-air rocket missile which was first used—and successfully—against the Japanese in a dispute between the two countries in the summer of 1939. Multiple ground-launched rocket missiles, under the direction of A. G. Kostikov, were also developed during this period, and final tests were successfully completed before the German attack in June 1941. In the month after the German attack the first rocket launcher, with its “Katyusha” rockets, went into action. Only eighteen months later, in January 1943, there were no less than 1,656 “Katyusha” batteries in action on the Russian front. Russian Rocketry describes these developments in popular and non­ technical language. Indeed, most of what is written about the “Kat­ * Dr. Smith is a historian with the National Air and Space Museum of the Smith­ sonian Institution. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 125 yushas” concerns the exploits of the men and units who used them and is usually in narrative form. Almost nothing is said about the develop­ ment of the large modern strategic and space rockets, and the “historical survey” jumps straight from the “Katyushas” to short accounts of the launching of the first Sputnik and Gagarin’s historic flight. From this point the remaining half of the book is given to describing, again in mostly narrative style, the roles and day-to-day activities of the army, air force, and naval units who handle the tactical and strategic rockets, a “live” example being the interception of the American U-2 spy plane in May 1960. To the non-Soviet reader a very important feature of the book must be its style, which throughout is, frankly, highly partisan and selfcongratulatory , some passages being no less than unabashed propaganda. For example, German troops are always referred to, not as German troops, but by some such phrase as “Hitlerite invaders” or “fascist hordes,” while Russian personnel and activities are invariably described by such adjectives as “vigilant,” “bold,” and “heroic,” particularly in the last chapters (describing the activities of present-day rocket units), where these words appear in profusion. Notwithstanding the book’s title, some non-Soviet developments in rockets and jet propulsion

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