January 7, 2025
By Jacob Bruggeman
The Soviet space program is not remembered; it is misremembered. The statues of Gagarin rise like monoliths to a triumph that tells only half the story. In the West, we cast it as a sideshow to our own grand narrative: NASA, the moon, the Right Stuff. But the history of the Soviet space program, as John Strausbaugh makes clear in The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, hardly unfolded so neatly. Beneath the propaganda, behind the steel beach ball of Sputnik, lies a tale of contradictions and chaos only Soviet bureaucracy and ideology could conjure.
Strausbaugh’s book is not a celebration. It is a dissection. The Soviet cosmonauts were not cowboys—they were hostages to a system that could just as easily send them to the Gulag as to the stars. Their bravery was born not of certainty but of fatalism, their victories snatched from a machinery that was, at best, indifferent to their survival. The engineers worked under the whip of a government that demanded miracles and punished mistakes, their ingenuity bending under impossible deadlines and the weight of an empire’s delusions.
What emerges is a story as harsh and barren as the Kazakhstan desert where Baikonur was built—an engineering marvel ringed with barbed wire and teeming with scorpions, a place that symbolized not progress but desperation. And yet, in this bleakness, there is something elemental, something deeply human. The Soviet scientists, dreamers like Korolyov and Chertok, were not driven by ideology but by a raw, unshakable belief in the possibility of something more.
This is not just a story of the past. It is a parable for the present, as a new race begins, this time not for the stars but for supremacy in AI and quantum computing. The lessons of the Soviet space program are as stark as its history: ambition without freedom is doomed to collapse, and the race, in the end, is never really won.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jacob Bruggeman: How the Soviet space program is remembered in the US? How is it remembered in places that used to be part of the Soviet Union. And what is it about our memory of the Soviet space program you're trying to address with this book?
John Strausbaugh: Like a lot of history, it is misremembered in both places. It's misremembered in the West, because we don't think about it much at all. We think almost entirely about the space age as being the space race to the moon, which NASA was going to win from day one. So we have an entirely NASA biased view of what went on between the 1950s and the end of the Soviet Union in terms of the space programs. We know very little about the Soviet space program. And indeed, that's why I decided to write a book about it. But it's equally, if in reverse, misremembered in the former Soviet Union, where it's known only for its glorious triumphs. There are statues of Gagarin everywhere. There's one enormous one of him appearing to be taking off under his own power and flying off into space like, you know, Ultraman. And they don't know anything about the rest of the space program, all the disasters and mistakes and problems that it had. They only know those few glorious moments. Not to take away from those glorious moments, but that's not the entire Soviet space program by a long shot. So I think it's poorly remembered in both places. And that's why I wrote the book.
When did the Soviet space program start, where did it start, and who the spacemen, engineers, scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts who powered it? What inspired them?
In a real sense, the Soviet space program begins in the 19th century, with pre-Soviet Russian thinkers. It's entirely theoretical and hypothetical, but people like Tsiolkovsky, one of the godfathers of the Soviet space program, was thinking very advanced thoughts about how to get people into outer space, which led to a group called the Cosmists who were positively mystical about it. The Cosmists had this idea that the goal of humanity is for everybody to live forever and for everybody who had previously died to be brought back to life on earth, which was going to make the planet very crowded very quickly. So they were very into space flight as the future of humanity and none of them were scientists. They had no idea how to do it, but they had hypothetical ideas about why to do it, which is very different, I think, from in the West. In the West, the early rocketeers are people like Goddard in America, Von Braun in Germany, Arthur C. Clarke in England—and in Russia, Sergei Korolyov—grew up reading science fiction writers like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, devoured it, and became avid for rocketry. When the first modern rockets—Goddard, for instance, in the 1920s, first started shooting off small but working rockets—there was a rocket fever around the world. And a lot of the guys who ended up being NASA scientists and engineers and Soviet scientists and engineers in their space program had started out as kids first reading science fiction and then being just totally inspired by what Goddard managed to do. Unfortunately for the Russians, they were operating within the Soviet communist system, which was an utterly dysfunctional empire. And it made it very, very hard for them to achieve what they managed to achieve.
This gets to what Tom Wolfe called “right stuff” vs. the “wrong stuff” in the space program, which you take up as the title of your book. Can you explain this term?
Writing about the jet pilots who became America’s first astronauts, the journalist Tom Wolfe popularized the notion of the Right Stuff, the jet pilot’s “ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line.” It was implicit in this transaction that the “hurtling piece of machinery” would be the very best that American money and know-how could produce—in short, the best in the world. Cosmonauts, their counterparts in the Soviet Union, had no such assurances that the machines they were being strapped down in were gonna work. They were in horrible machinery that was ready to fall apart under them as it was taking off. Their bravado was more reckless and fatalistic. I say that if the American astronauts had the Right Stuff, the Soviet cosmonauts had what I call the Wrong Stuff. The Americans weren't the space cowboys. They were the space engineers, the space pilots. The cosmonauts were the true space cowboys. Yippee-ki-yay, comrades.
Could you elaborate on what inspired the scientists like Sergei Korolyov or engineers like Boris Chertok? How did they think about ideology or politics, if at all?
I don't think most of the engineers and scientists in the Soviet space program were terribly political. However, they were operating in a terribly political environment. There's something in the Russian social psyche that's an underdog spirit. There was always a sense that they were going to show the West what they could accomplish in space, with maybe a veneer of patriotism. Going back to the 19th century, Russians believed in getting to outer space. Perhaps more than a lot of the people at NASA. A lot of the people at NASA were pencil pushing engineers and scientists. They were interested and they wanted to make it happen, but I don't think they had a passion to match that of the Soviet scientists and engineers. Take Boris Chertok. Chertok was born in Poland. He was Russian by heritage, but really more Polish than Russian. He came from one of the outposts of the empire, as did several of his colleagues. Korolyov, who led the program, was born in Ukraine, as were others. They were now “Russian” Russians. But they oriented their lives around making the space program work. When World War II ended, Soviet scientists said to Stalin, we can build great rockets. Chairman Stalin, even though you tried to kill us all in the Gulag, we're going to build you a great rocket. They were not motivated by politics. They were motivated by a passion for space. It's a deeply humanistic sort of story about a desire for exploration, achievement, and the transcendence of political pressures, even though it got these guys into trouble. Obviously, both the American and Soviet space programs were highly political and propagandistic. But in the American program, engineers were given the leeway to test endlessly, to experiment. One small step for man at a time. You didn't have the luxury of any of that in the Soviet system. They were being buffeted back and forth by political winds daily. And they managed to accomplish what they managed to accomplish. That's admirable in its way.
This speaks to your opening anecdote about the cosmonauts being hurled into space by a cannon, right?
Yes. Good Lord. At the top of the Soviet space program were ridiculous men. But they were ridiculous because Khrushchev and the Brezhnev got to say to Korolyov and Voskozensky and Chertok, that's great that you that you got Sputnik up there, I'm loving it. But I want another one and I want it within three weeks. Korolyov and Voskozensky were guys who had already been in the Gulag system once. They had no desire to go back. So they made it happen. They put another one up in three weeks with a dog in it, knowing that that dog was going to die up there because they had no clue yet how to bring satellites back down.
When Americans think about the space race, they might picture specific American places Cape Canaveral, Florida, for example, or the Kennedy Space Center. What — or where — does Soviet or former Soviet citizens picture when they think about the space race?
The Soviet counterpoint to Cape Canaveral, later Cape Kennedy, was a place called the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It was not actually located in Baikonur, but the Soviets called it the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the hopes of throwing off the American intelligence community. In part because of that Soviet mania for secrecy, they decided to locate Baikonur somewhere extremely remote, where its activities, and especially its failures, wouldn't be seen by the rest of the world. So, they looked on a map and they found this rail siding out in the middle of nowhere in the desert of Kazakhstan and said, that's it. That's where we're going to put our Cosmodrome, as they called it. It was a terrible place. It was the worst place on earth, and no one associated with it would ever want to be there again. When you read their memoirs and their commentary now, they talk about how much they hated being stuck in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert. It was very hard to build out there. They built themselves a Cape Canaveral, which meant pouring a lot of concrete, digging a lot of holes, and lot laborers passing out and dying. It was furiously hot in the summer, and bitter cold in the winter. It was ringed with barbed wire because it was a secret facility. The Soviets had lots of secret facilities. While the Soviets built their facility in such a remote location to maintain secrecy, the Americans were flying U2s over it the day they started. The Americans knew exactly what Baikonur was from day one. The site itself was infested with rats, tarantulas, scorpions. It was like the flea-bitten hellhole opposite of Cape Canaveral, which was bad enough. And it was officially a dry facility, so the scientists and engineers working there smuggled in whatever alcohol they could get to drink. And being Russians, they drank a lot. That's one of the reasons I think cosmonauts were as brave as they were, because they drank vodka like water.
We tend to think of Sputnik as the defining opening shot of the space race. But your book downplays the importance of Sputnik by pointing out that this success disguised deeper pathologies within the Soviet space program. Can you unpack what this argument of the book? What should we think about Sputnik as a result?
You can't deny that Sputnik was a stunning, gigantic propaganda victory. But it was almost purely a propaganda victory, much more so than a scientific or engineering victory. It was also a great demonstration of the Wrong Stuff. The Soviets had everything against them in putting that satellite up there before the Americans. That was the entire motivation. The Americans were saying they were going to put a satellite in the late 50s. And Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, told Soviet engineers to do it before the Americans made it happen. But the Soviet system had its problems. Everything in the Soviet Union was centrally planned by usually ignorant and self-serving bureaucrats. Logistics were a big trouble. The supply lines are ridiculously long across the Soviet Union, and the weather was against them at all turns. And the equipment Soviet engineers got was not only hard to get, but inferior to anything in the West. The Soviets were still using vacuum tube computers in 1980, whereas every kid in America had a transistor radio. Soviet scientists were working against all this, not the least of which was a political leader who says to them: make it happen, make it happen now. When Krushchev said make Sputnik happen, the Soviet scientists made it happen. Sputnik itself was basically a steel beach ball that functioned as a radio. But it shocked the world and shocked the Americans in particular. It was a much greater propaganda feat than a marvel of engineering and scientific expertise. And it was one success in a line of what were then stunning propaganda successes, including putting Sputnik two, the first man, and the first woman into space. These seemed like great victories, but they were isolated victories in a landscape of tremendous failures and disasters. Some of the biggest disasters in space exploration to this day were in the Soviet program and hidden by the Soviet government until the Soviet government fell, and we began to learn.
What do you see as the principal causes of the Soviet program's ultimate failures? Was it the pressures associated with the arms race under Reagan? Was it internal ideological baggage?
Ronald Reagan did not end the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union ended itself. It's less amazing that it finally fell apart in 1990 and 91 than that it lasted so long. Because it shouldn't have. It collapsed of its own weight. The space program struggled within this political environment of tremendous dysfunction. Toward the end of the Cold War, when Brezhnev and Reagan faced off over the so-called Star Wars program, competition did push the Soviets over the edge toward a total collapse. But they were heading for total collapse anyway. For the longest time, the Soviet Union had been what John McCain said about Russia, a gas station masquerading as a country. And when their oil reserves began to fail them in the 1970s, things began to go downhill quite quickly. And all the other weaknesses of their political economy became glaringly obvious, including to everybody inside their empire.
Your book uncovers a stifling and counterproductive bureaucratic competition within the Soviet space program. Tell us more about the nature of that competition.
Ironically, the Americans were a little more Soviet about things and had one central agency, NASA, to control their ostensibly non-military space flights. It was exactly the opposite under the Soviet system. There were competing space agencies. The most successful was Korolyov’s organization. Yet, scientists like Korolyov were never just competing with NASA. He was always competing with other scientists and engineers sponsored by different political leaders, who were vying for power. As a result, factions within the Soviet space programs robbed resources from one another.
How much of the Soviet space program’s failures come down to the different political economic systems in competition—liberal democracy and market capitalism in the US, and communism and centralized party rule in the USSR?
It's a simple answer: all the Soviet space program’s shortcomings, problems, and disasters stemmed from the political and economic system in which it operated. The vast bureaucracies competing with one another made everything harder for the cosmonauts. And a political system based on the whims of an autocratic ruler, who told engineers to put three cosmonauts in a spacecraft that was built for one cosmonaut and to get it up there within six weeks or you were headed to the gulag, was not always germane to scientific autonomy and achievement. On the other hand, the liberal democratic environment in the U.S. meant that NASA people had everything they needed, including discretion, to achieve goals. Korolyov, Voskresensky, and Chertok were so envious of what ]their NASA counterparts doing—and they would have loved to operate in a system like NASA.
As China and the United States enter an era of high-tech geopolitical competition defined by chips and AI, what lessons or historical perspectives would we be wise to remember from competition with the Soviet Union in the space race?
For one thing, not all communist empires are the same. It was a hopeless task in a lot of ways to expect Russians to make communism work on a grand scale. But the Chinese are certainly demonstrating that they're more organized. Their space program currently shows that. Chinese advances in computer technology show that. While the USSR was hopelessly behind in almost any kind of technology in the late 20th century, the Chinese are right up there with us. If we care about being a great power in the world, sharing the world with China, we must encourage technological development, especially artificial intelligence and quantum computers. This is the space race of the 21st century.
Jacob Bruggeman is the associate editor of FUSION.