Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

by Stephen Walker

Hardcover, 2021

Status

Available

Publication

Harper (2021), 512 pages

Description

April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile - originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead - and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is about to make history. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour - ten times faster than a rifle bullet - Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the planet. "Beyond" tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its sixtieth anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first - the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race between them would come down to the wire. Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama - featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member breic
Fantastic history! Eminently readable, a total page-turner. I learned lots about the Russian space program, and Walker does a good job integrating some well-written and well-curated stories about the American program in as well.

> ‘I got on the project because it will probably be the closest to
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heaven I’ll ever get,’ he joked, and the room dissolved. Glenn was an instant star.

> approximately one twentieth of the Mercury astronauts’ salaries along with their Life monies. At one point Tamara Titova and two other wives found themselves polishing other people’s floors just to make ends meet. And while Alan Shepard and some of his fellow astronauts were racing their latest-model Corvettes up and down Cocoa Beach, Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts were taking the bus or train in Chkalovsky. None of them could afford a car.

> ‘The men were doing some very complicated exercises on these trampolines, not up to circus standards, perhaps, but their performance was neat, bold and certain.’

> unlike the Mercury capsule, the Vostok was too heavy to land safely beneath its own parachute with a human inside. The only way for them to get home was therefore to eject from the Vostok in the final minutes of descent and parachute independently to the ground.
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LibraryThing member gothamajp
After recently reading “Mercury Rising” about the early days of the American manned space program (Book #69) this book provides an equally fascinating insight into what was happening on the other side of the so-called space race.

Walker does an excellent job in contrasting and comparing the
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approaches of USA and USSR to launching a man into space. But the focus of the book is firmly on the formerly hidden people behind the successful mission to put a man into orbit.

While it’s a story influenced by technological innovation and political meddling (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) it is above all a very human story, and one which Walker tells superbly.

This is a must read if you have any interest in the history of space exploration.
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Awards

Notable Books List (Nonfiction — 2022)

Language

Original language

English
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