Rockets and People, Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War (NASA History Series. NASA SP-2009-4110). This item is unavailable.Rockets and People, Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War (NASA History Series. NASA SP-2009-4110)

Volume 3 of the memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, translated from the original Russian. Covers the history of the Soviet space program from 1961 to 1967.

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.