Despite the wealth of information and archival material that has become available in the years following the fall of the USSR, the history of the Soviet space program has been dominated by the accounts of a select few, such as the recent four-volume English translation of Russian rocket designer Boris Chertok.

In this remarkable oral history, author and interviewer Slava Gerovitch helps to enrich and complicate space historiography by presenting interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand, from the cosmonauts themselves to the military officials who directed the program to the engineers who made real the grand ambitions of the USSR.

Rather than comprising a monolithic "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.