Hugin & Munin Journal

I have always been fascinated by the space race of the 1960s: its sheer audacity, the extraordinary concentration of money and talent, and the fact that humans reached the Moon only to leave again after a few brief years. Most of the version I grew up with was American. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo formed a clear ascending sequence, culminating in Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface. John Strausbaugh’s The Wrong Stuff reverses that perspective. It tells the story largely from the Soviet side and concentrates not only on the triumphs, but on the secrecy, institutional rivalry, improvised engineering and political pressure behind them. That makes the book vivid and frequently astonishing. It also creates its principal weakness. Strausbaugh is so good at exposing the chaos beneath the propaganda that the chaos can begin to look like the whole explanation. The Soviet achievements were polished for public consumption, but they were not imaginary. Propaganda could exaggerat...

SpaceX’s early history is often compressed into a familiar story: an unusually determined founder challenges a stagnant industry, survives repeated failure, and proves the sceptics wrong. Eric Berger’s Liftoff is compelling because the reality it describes is both more dramatic and less tidy. The company’s survival depended on Elon Musk’s money and appetite for risk, but also on engineers, technicians, government facilities, NASA funding, and a public agency willing to become an anchor customer. SpaceX was not inevitable. Nor was it built outside the state. It emerged from an unusual combination of private urgency and deliberately redesigned public support. Cover image: Liftoff by Eric Berger, published by William Morrow. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. A Company Small Enough to Fail Berger concentrates on the first four Falcon 1 launch attempts, when SpaceX had fewer than two hundred employees and no guarantee that it would survive long enough...