John Strausbaugh: The Cosmonautical Eye

“Sputniks and muttniks flying everywhere. They’re so ironic, are they atomic? Those funny missiles have got me scared!” So sang country singer Ray Anderson soon after the Soviet Union launched a satellite named Sputnik 2—and its passenger, a mutt named Laika— into space on November 3, 1957.

The real story of Laika’s fateful—and fatal—trip into sub-orbit is one of many strange events detailed by John Strausbaugh in his superbly readable and compelling history of the Soviet space program, The Wrong Stuff.

With its title play off of Tom Wolfe’s classic book on the early American space program, The Right Stuff, Strausbaugh examines the weird, courageous and sometimes comic world of their Communist counterparts who, against long technological odds, bested the U.S. more than once in space race “firsts.”

As grade schooler in Baltimore, Maryland, Strausbaugh caught the space bug early and it never went away. Now, after a remarkable trilogy of New York histories— The Village (2013), City of Sedition (2016) and Victory City (2018), the latter two about the city during the Civil War and World War II eras respectively—the newly reborn Manhattanite has made the world of the cosmonauts come vividly alive too.

After three books on New York, you ended up in a tin can wearing in a leisure suit on your way to orbit. How did we get here?

I grew up with the space race. I’ve always been a space nerd. At some point it occurred to me that in America we only ever heard the NASA side of the story. We knew much less about the Soviet space program. Now, a lot of that was because the Soviets were so maniacal about keeping so much of it secret. They even hid the name of the man who ran it, Sergei Korolev. It first appeared in his obituary the day after he died. They trumpeted their victories, which were undeniable – the first satellite in space, the first human in space, and so on. But unlike the Americans, who made all their embarrassing mistakes and had their tragic mishaps in public, the Soviets hid theirs.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the truth began flooding out. Records and diaries that had been secret were made public. Cosmonauts, engineers and scientists felt free to write their memoirs. So I was able to write a book about the space race that emphasized the Soviet side for once and talk a lot about those once-hidden mistakes and accidents.

For our few readers who aren’t Gravity’s Rainbow fanatics, tell us about the post-war battle for German rocket engineers.

The space race actually began on the ground as World War II in Europe was ending. In the spring of 1945 Soviet troops were flooding into Germany from the east and the Allies from the west. In the middle stood the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, designer of the V-2. Both the Americans and the Soviets recognized that he had advanced past their own rocket developers, and each hoped to grab him and as many of his rockets as they could before the other side got to him.

Von Braun considered the vengeful Cossack hordes rushing at him from one side and the gum-chewing Americans ambling toward him from the other and sagely decided he’d much rather be captured by the Americans. He and his top team sought them out and surrendered to them—a thousand scientists and engineers, along with a cornucopia of blueprints and detailed notes, and the parts for 100 V-2s. The Soviets were left to scrounge for whatever scraps of the V-2 and lower-level engineers the Americans left behind. The race was on. The astonishing thing is how quickly the Soviets caught up and even for a while surged ahead.

Any science fiction books or movies you enjoyed as a kid?

I devoured science fiction paperbacks as a kid. There were racks of them at the check-out counters in every grocery store and drug store, and they were cheap. He wasn’t a typical sci-fi writer, but Philip K. Dick had a huge impact on my brain and remains one of my most favorite writers in any genre or form. The pioneers of rocketry, by the way, all grew up reading Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, just as pretty much all of today’s rocketeers grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars. Sci-fi may seem like silly kid stuff, but a lot of those kids grow up into serious space people.

Though we are currently at a low point in U.S.–Russian relations, it’s hard not to have a great deal of empathy for the Russian people.

The Russian people have endured so much for centuries. It helps explain their stoicism, a certain bleak sense of humor, and vodka. As I was researching this book I developed a great respect for the early cosmonauts. American astronauts knew they could rely on the best technology in the world to get them into space and back. That was integral to what Tom Wolfe called “the Right Stuff.” Cosmonauts had no such assurances. Soviet space technology was jerry-rigged, the scientists rushed and intimidated by their political leaders. Cosmonauts were the real space cowboys.

The early ones didn’t even land inside their capsules. They were jettisoned out of them on descent and parachuted down separately, because in their mania for secrecy the Soviets had them making hard landings out in the middle of nowhere in the Kazakhstan desert. Eventually one cosmonaut was killed horribly inside a capsule making what’s known in the business as a “ballistic” landing. Astronauts showed great courage, but I’d argue that cosmonauts maybe showed more, because they had to. I call it the Wrong Stuff. Drinking vodka like water probably helped, too.

Tell us about Sputnik and popular culture. Younger readers might only know the “Please Mr. Kennedy” scene from Inside Llewelyn Davis.

The average American wasn’t particularly impressed or vexed by Sputnik. For Americans in 1957, threats from outer space meant flying saucers and aliens with ray guns, not a circling beachball that couldn’t do anything but go beep. At first Sputnik was little more than fodder for pop culture references, like the cutesy love song “Satellite” by Teresa Brewer, torturing metaphors about how her love was like a satellite “in an orbit around your heart.” Roosevelt Sykes’s “Sputnik Baby” and Skip Stanley’s “Satellite Baby” offered more rock and roll versions of the same sentiment.

The band that outdid them all was Swedish. A Ventures-style guitar group calling themselves the Spotnicks wore spaceman outfits and played catchy tunes with “out-a space” or Russian themes. Meanwhile, the Starlite Hotel near Cape Canaveral got new space-themed murals and advertised itself as “Sputnikked up.” Bartenders around the country started serving the Sputnik cocktail, made of course with vodka. By 1958, the-nik from Sputnik had been borrowed for the diminutive term for certain American hipsters—beatnik.

After decades on the edge of Brooklyn Heights, you recently moved back to Manhattan—Kips Bay specifically. Any impressions so far?

I’m loving being back in Manhattan. When I moved to New York City in 1990, it was to be in Manhattan. The Village first, then the Lower East Side, then other neighborhoods, and then I went out to Brooklyn Heights and stayed for a long time. But my heart was always Manhattan-centric. Yesterday I walked from Kips Bay down to meet a friend at Mona’s at 14th [Street] and [Avenue] B and felt like I was home again. Yes, Manhattan has changed a lot since 1990, but it’s still one of the great places in the world to live, work, walk around.

“The Wrong Stuff” is published by Public Affairs Books. John Strausbaugh’s eponymous, history-themed podcast is available on all major streaming platforms.