The Heavens and the Earth – A Political History of the Space Age: A Political History of the Space Age (Revised) - Softcover

Mcdougall, Walter A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801857481 ISBN 13: 9780801857485

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on published literature, archival sources in both the United States and Europe, interviews with many of the key participants, and important declassified material, such as the National Security Council's first policy paper on space, McDougall examines U.S., European, and Soviet space programs and their politics. Opening with a short account of Nikolai Kibalchich, a late nineteenth-century Russian rocketry theoretician, McDougall argues that the Soviet Union made its way into space first because it was the world's first "technocracy"―which he defines as "the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose." He also explores the growth of a political economy of technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

About this title

Review:

"Exhaustively researched, brilliantly conceived, and beautifully written."

(New York Times Book Review)

"A lucid and comprehensive political history of the American, European, and Russian space programs."

(New Scientist)

"Once every decade or so, a book comes along that stands by itself as a remarkable contribution to the literature of a field. Such a work is Walter A. McDougall's... the Heavens and the Earth."

(Technology and Culture)

"[A] boldly conceived, elegantly written, and unfailingly provocative history of the new age of space."

(Science)

"This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy."

(The Astronomical Society of the Pacific)

"[An] immensely readable and elegant book."

(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

"The definitive, surprising and highly readable history of the U.S. space program. Forget visionary rhetoric about humans' need to explore the next frontier: McDougal demonstrates how NASA's moon missions grew directly from Hitler's V-2 rocket project at Pennemunde and were all about the classic military necessity of controlling the high ground―in this case the really high ground... [One of] the five best books I have read about the U.S. space program."

(Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down)

Book Description:

Now in paperback―a widely acclaimed history of the space age.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0801857481
• ISBN 13: 9780801857485
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 584