Rockets and people
by B. E. Chertok · first published 2011
12mentions
7recommended by
9HN commenters
2015–2026first – last mentioned
78% recommend22% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Firsthand memoir from a senior Soviet rocketry engineer, giving an inside view of the Soviet space program and its engineers' working conditions. Suggested for anyone wanting the Soviet side of the space race in depth.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I've been reading "Rockets and People" by Boris Chertok from this collection, and would recommend it. Chertok was a high-level engineer in the Russian Space industry, and its a much different story than the American side of things, with…
on “NASA's free history e-book collection” ↗…phonetic transliteration would be Korolyov, not Korolev. ё instead of е in the middle. Asif Siddiqi has a good book on the subject, "Challenge to Apollo". I'd also recomment Boris Chertok's memoirs, "Rockets and People Volume IV: The Moon Race". You'd learn, for example, how many launches of N-1 were originally planned for each expedition to the Moon and how that number eventually boiled down to 1.
on “A Cosmonaut on the Moon: Korlev’s N-1/L3 Plan” ↗I'd strongly recommend Boris Chertok's "Rockets and People" - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta... . 4-volume first hand account (Chertok's immediate boss was Korolev and then Mishin, of N-1 fame, and Glushko, Energiya-Buran) . Really…
on “SpaceX SN9 Explodes on Landing” ↗This is a great compilation, very cleanly presented. If you'd like to learn more, in a much more verbose format, the "Rockets and People" four volume series of books by Boris Chertok (Korolev's right hand man) has been translated, courtesy of Nasa, and is available on archive.org https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Chertok%2C...…
on “The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines” ↗Or they can go to the source material for this clickbait article and read Rockets and People, by Chertok.
on “A Drunk Driver Led to the Birth of Russia’s Sputnik 1” ↗One of the best books about soviet rocketry is "Rockets and People" ([1]). My blood boiled at how badly German engineers were treated on the Soviet side and how inefficient the use of their skills was. They literally landed Germans on an island and gave an important,…
…on a book [3], but I have not read it. There is a lot of information available on the American space programs all over the internet, but if you would like to read about their Soviet counterparts, give Rockets and People [4] a go. Finally, to get an idea of what it is like to live in outer space nowadays, Chris Hadfield's autobiography An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth [5] is a good read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi...…
on “Ask HN: What are some good educational books about our space program?” ↗…50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed. You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular…
on “A rough guide for going back to the Moon” ↗According to Rockets and People by Chertok, they've solved that issue in late 70s by properly organizing the process and setting the right balance between personal responsibility and root cause analysis. However, in the last decade…
on “Space station leak caused by drill, not meteorite” ↗In Boris Chertok's "Rockets and People" vol 3 p 366[1], there's an aside about how Soviet ICBMs with MIRV did targeting by comparing on-board radar with a digital map of topographical features in the 70's. [1] free to download from NASA:…
on “Darpa to re-invent GPS navigation without the use of satellites” ↗According to Boris Chertok (see NASA books, "Rockets and People"), a control specialist of the early soviet space program, the lack of good digital computers was one factor in losing the race to the moon. The early space missions were controlled by electromechanical…
on “Fairchild Semiconductor: 60th Anniversary” ↗…300kt explosion at 290km altitude, above the middle of nowhere in 60's Kazakhstan. Really puts things into perspective. Such a test would be devastating to the modern infrastructure. Boris Chertok (of Rockets and People fame) also wrote that the radio communication was interrupted by another test in the series (K-5) for about an hour, at the distance of 500km from the test site.
on “The U.S. set off a nuclear bomb in space in 1962” ↗