The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957.

Cultural history of the Russian and Soviet fascination with spaceflight, tracing the idea of interplanetary travel through fiction, popular culture, and technical writing from the mid-nineteenth century to Sputnik. A companion to Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo (above), concerned less with hardware and policy than with the imaginative and cultural roots that produced them. Part of the Cambridge Centennial of Flight series.