Red Star in Orbit

by James Oberg, Tom Wolfe (foreword)

Acknowledgments
Foreword
At home in orbit
The birth of Sputnik
The Nedelin catastrophe
Man & woman in space
The Voskhod follies
Death & disaster
The mooon-race cover-up
The long climb back
Secret space cities
The Salyut-6 breakthrough
Through the Zero-G barrier
Things to come
Appendices
Biographies
Guest Cosmonauts
Soviet Man-Related Space Shots
Annotated Bibliography
Sources of Current Information
Open Questions
Index

Genres: History, Space, Science, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 1981

Reviews

[Bob Feeney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good if your interested in early space face history. If not, this book is not for you.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The space program was a big, big deal when I was growing up, big enough that I remember Sputnik, though I was only five; Gagarin, the first man in space who interrupted Paladin on TV; the Echo satellites, which we watched pass overhead at night; and every manned American launch through the moon landing in the summer of 1969. Indeed, I found some pages of a diary I'd written in fourth grade, discovering that most of my attention then was on a probe headed for Venus.

This book is about the Soviet side of things. Written by an expert, it focuses on their efforts to get humans into space. Things like spy satellites are mentioned, but the emphasis is on "manned" (only one woman orbited) missions and those unmanned missions designed to support two major efforts: (a) to visit the moon and (b) to maintain a permanent space station. Of course, the Soviets abandoned the first object after the Americans beat them. The second effort continues.

Most interesting to me was the author's handling of the many rumors about Soviet space failures engendered by their veils of secrecy. Here most are accounted for--and usually not as luridly as Fate Magazine and the tabloids represented them at the time.

[Charles Collard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just re-read this recently. It's one of my favorite soviet-era non-fiction books. Compelling history that very people know about.

Read it and you will cringe every time you see some poor souls being launched toward the ISS from Baikonur. ;)

[Adhoc · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent read but this book is outdated and contains a lot of speculation that has since been shown to be wrong.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent time capsule read on Soviet space projects up until 1981, interesting perspectives on the longest spaceflights up to that time

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Oberg cemented his reputation as an expert on the Soviet/Russian space program with this 1981 volume. Featuring a foreword by The Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe, Oberg offered a (for its time) sweeping study of their efforts from Sputnik to Salyut and the race to the Moon in-between. It's an immensely readable history and mythbuster, while also acting as a historical document on the limits of Western knowledge of events (including a 1960 disaster involving an attempted rocket launch that proved devestating to Soviet rocketry). While superseeded by the end of the Cold War and Oberg's own writings as a result, Red Star in Orbit remains a welcome addition to the shelves of anyone interested in the history of space flight, particularly during its first two decades, thanks to Oberg's methodical but concise accounting of this history.

[Colin Birge · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1980, when he wrote Red Star in Orbit, James Oberg was one of the leading Western experts on the Soviet space program - a not inconsiderable achievement, given how little reliable documentation there was on the subject outside of the Soviet government. Red Star in Orbit was Oberg's tale of the Soviet space program as it was then known.

For those interested in spaceflight, it's a fascinating read on two levels. Oberg is an entertaining popular science writer, and gives vivid descriptions of the unheralded heroics of some of the Soviet pioneers in space.

His book is also outrageously dated, most vividly in its assumptions. Oberg was writing after detente but before glasnost. The Cold War was alive and well. Oberg displayed that peculiar attitude of early 80s Americans: the Soviets couldn't possibly do anything better than Americans, except that they could, would and sometimes did. Compare Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October, written only a couple years later: Clancy's Russian submarines, like Oberg's Soyuz' and Salyuts, were kludgey pieces of junk that by some miracle were still often better built than their American counterparts. Both books are like reading two pieces of propaganda at once: "We're better!" but "They're coming to get us anyway!" Oberg thought the Soviets would be on Mars by now.

All that said, time proved that Oberg got more right than wrong, and he's a great storyteller. If you're a space junkie as I am, hold the grain of salt in your hands as you read, but enjoy the book anyway.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was good, but it is terribly outdated. It was written in 1981, eight years before the Soviet Union broke up. It covers nothing of the US or Soviet Space Shuttle programs, nothing of Skylab or Mir, and what it does cover is of questionable legitimacy because of the unofficial sources. A good read for sure, just some things to keep in mind while reading it.

The last chapter 'Things to Come' was especially amusing, saying we would have colonized Mars and even some asteroids by 2000.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the good ol' days of the early 80's this was the book to read on the Soviet Space Program. James Oberg, is the premier expert on the Russian Space Program and this was his take on what they might do. It is now out of date. Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union we now know somethings that we could only speculate about. Still this is a good read and should be read before tackling the revelations of the early 90's.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a bit dated because it was written in the '80s, especially the last chapter (which theorizes what's next in the Soviet space program), but it's still an excellent account of the Soviet space program from pre-Sputnik through close to the end of the Salyut program (there's not much talk of Mir).

[Geoff Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this whilst studying, and whilst I only had to read one chapter, I devoured the whole book.