The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age

This highly acclaimed study approaches space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on published literature, archival sources in both United States and Europe, interviews with many of key participants, and important declassified material, such as 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 Soviet Union made its way into space first because it was world's first technocracy-which he defines as the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose. He also explores growth of a political economy of technology in both Soviet Union and United States.