The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned

John Strausbaugh. PublicAffairs, $30 (272p) ISBN 978-1-541-70334-6

This buzzy yet unbalanced survey of the Soviet space race from historian Strausbaugh (Victory City) plays on the title of Tom Wolfe’s account of American astronauts, The Right Stuff. Strausbaugh opines that the Soviets—who launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, into space in 1957; the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961; and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963—relied on the “wrong stuff.” Drawing from published histories and memoirs (such as Mathew Brzezinski’s Red Moon Rising), he relates a string of near-catastrophes, deadly flukes, and cover-ups. He portrays key players in the Soviet program as hard drinkers with “reckless bravado,” who under unrelenting political pressure sent cosmonauts into orbit with glitchy equipment, and suggests the Soviet government kept its lead in the space race through subterfuge: when the first animal (a dog named Laika) was sent into orbit in 1957, “the Soviets issued false reports [she] was doing fine”; later, when a fire broke out aboard the aging space station Mir, Russian authorities “blandly lied” about how safe the highly flammable oxygen containers were. Though captivating, these anecdotes deserve scrutiny. Strausbaugh relies heavily on secondhand sources and familiar tropes of Russian bravery teetering on madness. He also issues generic criticisms of “a society rotten with corruption and almost guaranteed to underperform,” and underassesses Soviet scientific achievements. Readers earnestly interested in the topic will want to explore elsewhere. (June)