Epic Rivalry - The inside story of the Soviet and American Space Race Authors: Von Hardesty and Gene Eisman Publisher: National Geographic ISBN: 978-1-4262-01119-6 Price: £9.99 (Hb), 276pp
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Dr Sergei Krushchev, son of former Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev, reveals in a long foreword that the launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first satellite, would have been taken for granted in the Soviet Union had it not created such sensational alarm
in the United States. Only then did the Soviet Government realise the enormous prestige value of the achievement. Sergei,
who now lives in the US and is a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies,
became a distinguished rocket engineer and, thanks to his father's patronage, worked for Vladimir Chelomei, a rival of
Sergei Korolev in designing rockets and spacecraft.

Sergei describes vividly how Korolev, having won Nikita's favour following his successful launches of the early cosmonauts, would brook no rivals in planning to send men to the Moon. Not only did he get rid of Chelomei, but he
also despatched the team of German rocket engineers collected by the Soviets at the end of the war to a remote island and ignored the designs they sent to him. The result was that Korolev was far behind when America's Apollo 11 landed the first men and, says Sergei, "Korolev had lost the competition even before it started."

Von Hardesty is curator of Washington's Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and he and his co-author Gene Eisman - a historian specialising in Russian affairs - have quarried newly
released documents and pictures to produce yet another very readable study of the race to land men on the Moon.

Reginald Turnill