John Strausbaugh's "The Wrong Stuff"

John Strausbaugh is a well known author of history books. His titles include Victory City, City of Sedition, and The Village. A former editor of New York Press, he has written about history and culture for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Evergreen Review, the Wilson Quarterly, and other publications.

Strausbaugh applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, and reported the following:

The Wrong Stuff is a history of the surprisingly ramshackle Soviet space program, and how its success was more spin than science. Driven by propaganda-crazed political leaders, Soviet rocket scientists achieved great feats of make-do ingenuity against bedeviling odds – except when they failed. The government trumpeted the victories and hid the failures, which only became public knowledge after the Soviet Union fell.

A good part of the book is about the young cosmonauts who risked life and limb in jerry-rigged space vehicles, and sometimes died in them. Page 99 is about one of them, Gherman Titov, as a young recruit. Like most cosmonauts, he had grown up dirt-poor in a poor country. From that page:

By February 1960 an initial field of three thousand cosmonaut candidates was whittled down to a group of only twenty. Korolev called them his “little eagles.” [Yuri] Gagarin emerged early as one of the front-runners. His chief competitor was Gherman Titov, who came from a similar background but was of a very different temperament. Two years younger than Gagarin, Titov grew up poor in an isolated, often snowbound Siberian village in the region called the Altai Krai. His father, a schoolteacher, built the family’s one-room log cabin. Gherman slept on a shelf above his mother’s narrow bed. A sister would later say that maybe it was sleeping up near the ceiling that gave him his first dreams of flying. His father filled the little home with books, and Gherman grew up to be unusually literate for a fighter pilot. He wrote poetry and recited Pushkin at length. An uncle who was a World War I flyer inspired him to join the air force. He earned his wings on his twenty-second birthday. Where Gagarin was a middling pilot, Titov was an ace. Unlike Gagarin, who always looked like his uniform was a little too big for him, Titov looked sharp, natty, well-tailored. And while Gagarin could be friendly as a puppy, Titov could be argumentative to a point that nearly derailed his career more than once when he popped off at superior officers. He and Gagarin admired each other the way opposites do. When it grew clear that they were the stars of the group, they engaged in a fierce competition to be the first human in space.

Except for a small hint of what the rest of the book is like, I don't think a single page can possibly give a sense of the scope of the story. It begins at the end of World War II and follows the Soviet space program through decades of triumphs and defeats to the end of the USSR and its legacy in the equally cash-strapped and slapdash Russian space efforts today. Page 99 is just one step on a much longer journey.

Visit John Strausbaugh's website.

The Page 99 Test: Victory City.

--Marshal Zeringue