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More About This Textbook
Overview
This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on published literature, archival sources in both the United States and Europe, interviews with many of the key participants, and important declassified material, such as the 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 the Soviet Union made its way into space first because it was the world's first "technocracy"—which he defines as "the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose." He also explores the growth of a political economy of technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States.
The Johns Hopkins University Press
This book traces the Space Age from the visionary fantasies of the 19th century's pioneers in rocketry to the Star Wars scenarios of the 1980's.
Editorial Reviews
New York Times Book Review
Exhaustively researched, brilliantly conceived, and beautifully written.
New Scientist
A lucid and comprehensive political history of the American, European, and Russian space programs.
Technology and Culture
Once every decade or so, a book comes along that stands by itself as a remarkable contribution to the literature of a field. Such a work is Walter A. McDougall's ... the Heavens and the Earth.
Science
[A] boldly conceived, elegantly written, and unfailingly provocative history of the new age of space.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific
This highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
[An] immensely readable and elegant book.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian examines the competing U.S. and Soviet space programs. (Oct.)Product Details
Related Subjects
Meet the Author
Walter A. McDougall is Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and editor of Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs. He is also author of France's Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1942: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe.
The Johns Hopkins University Press
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