THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT QUARTERLY
Volume 19, Number 3
2012OUEST
RECOVERING A KH-9
HEXAGON CAPSULE
FROM 16,400 FEET
BELOW THE
PACIFIC OCEAN
NACA/NASA
RESEARCH AIRCRAFT
AND THE BIRTH OF
SPACEFLIGHT
NATIONAL PRESTIGE AND
HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT
A CHINESE PERSPECTIVE
AN INTERVIEW
WITH
YANG LIWEI AND
ZHAI ZHIGANG
ANALYZING TASS
ANNOUNCEMENTS
ON THE SOVIET
SPACE PROGRAM
Photo Credit: Robert Markowitz, NASA
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4 An Underwater Ice Station Zebra
Recovering a KH-9 HEXAGON Capsule from 
16,400 Feet Below the Pacific Ocean
By David W. Waltrop
18 National Prestige and Human Spaceflight
A Chinese Perspective
By Liang Yang
31 China’s Great Leap into Space
An Interview with Yang Liwei and Zhai Zhigang
By John Vause
36 NACA/NASA Research Aircraft and the 
Birth of Spaceflight
By Curtis Peebles
44 Managing the News:
Analyzing TASS Announcements on the 
Soviet Space Program (1957-1964)
By Bart Hendrickx
Contents
Volume 19 • Number 3   2012
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More Reviews
64 Into the Blue:
American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight
Edited by Joseph J. Corn
Review by Dominick A. Pisano
65 Destination Mars: 
New Explorations of the Red Planet
Book by Rod Pyle
Review by Bob Craddock
66 Soviet Space Culture
Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies
Edited by Maurer, Richers, Rüthers, and Scheide
Review by Michael J. Neufeld
67 The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty 
Years of NASA’s First Space Plane
Book by Piers Bizony
Review by Roger D. Launius
68 The Astronaut: 
Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity
Book by Dario Llinares
Review by Amy E. Foster
69 Radio Wars (DVD)
Directed by Sandra Mohr 
Review by Scott M. Sacknoff
70 Rockets and People: The Moon Race
Book by Boris Chertok, Series Editor, Asif Siddiqi
Review by Andrew L. Jenks
71 Centauri Dreams:
Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
Book by Paul Gilster
Review by Roger D. Launius
72 How Apollo Flew to the Moon
Book by W. David Woods
Review by Rod Pyle
Book Reviews
59 Exploring Mars:
Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery
Book by Scott Hubbard
Review by Erik M. Conway
60 Emerging Space Powers: 
The New Space Programs of Asia, the Middle East, 
and South America
Book by Brian Harvey, Henk Smid, and Theo Pirard
Review by Cathleen S. Lewis
61 Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope
Book by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly 
Review by Roger D. Launius
62 Empire of the Stars: 
Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the
Quest for Black Holes
Book by Arthur I. Miller
Review by Steven J. Dick
Q U E S T   19:3    2012
66
Edited by Eva Maurer, Julia Richers,
Monica Rüthers, and Carmen
Scheide. 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
ISBN 978-0-230-27435-8
Pages:  344
Price:  $85.00, hardcover
When I remarked to a couple of colleagues that the cul-
tural history of Soviet space activities was ahead of the same
genre regarding the American program, they dismissed it as a
side effect of the difficulty of researching in Russian archives.
In fact, it is possible to do original archival research, although
I would not describe it as easy. Rather, the efflorescence of
cultural history is a manifestation of a larger trend in Russian
and East European area studies. Coming out of a vibrant inter-
est in the cultural and propaganda dimensions of Stalinism,
scholars have turned their attention to the Nikita Khrushchev
“thaw” period, in which the early spectacular space successes
induced a “cosmic enthusiasm” in the general public that was
not just the product of official propaganda. With the subse-
quent loss of space leadership and decline and fall of the
Soviet empire, that enthusiasm became a nationalist nostalgia
for an era when everything seemed possible and Russia led the
world.
My remark was occasioned by reading Soviet Space
Culture, and the near-simultaneous publication of Into the
Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture, edited by
James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Despite the nearly identical topics,
there is not much overlap in authors and topics among them.
The only noticeable difference is the presence of European
scholars in Soviet Space Culture (the editors are all connected
to Swiss or German universities). Together the two books pro-
vide a rich smorgasbord of  recent research into what
Alexander C. T. Geppert has called “astroculture” in another
recent edited volume, one he edited, Imagining Outer Space:
European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century
(London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 
There are 21 contributions (including introductions to
the four parts) in Soviet Space Culture. It is a cliché when one
reviews edited volumes to say that they are uneven. Among
the subjects covered are Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s philosophy,
the science fiction of Stanislas Lem and the Strugatskii broth-
ers, scientific atheism as propagated in Soviet planetariums,
the representation of Sergei Korolev and the cosmonauts in
Soviet and post-Soviet media, the regional efforts of space
organizations in the Kuban (east of the Black Sea), the Soviet
space exhibit at the 1958 Brussels world fair, cosmonaut ver-
sus astronaut visits to Yugoslavia, space travel in Soviet pop-
ular science journals, and cosmonaut images in Estonian art.
On the negative side, one of the articles on the Kuban is writ-
ten by a local Russian activist who is obviously not a histori-
an and does not think outside Soviet categories. The article
about Soviet atheist propaganda is useful, but planetariums
are barely mentioned. And an article comparing Soviet and
Western space songs and space films turns out to be about one
of each from West and East, an arbitrary sample that is
nowhere adequately rationalized.
Several articles are important and valuable, however.
The one that stood out for me was Michael Hagemeister’s
“The Conquest of Space and the Bliss of the Atoms:
Konstantin Tsiolkovskii.” I guarantee that, after reading this
article, you will never think the same way about the oft-saint-
ed pioneer again. Tsiolkovskii, as Asif Siddiqi has discussed
elsewhere, was an adherent of the Russian mystical philoso-
phy of cosmism, which posited spaceflight as necessary to the
resurrection of the dead and the perfection of humankind. One
third of his writings, according to Hagemeister, was devoted
to this topic. Among other things, humankind’s evolution into
perfect forms of pure energy would entail, in Hagemeister’s
summary, the elimination of “all imperfect, useless and harm-
ful forms of life… which Tsiolkovskii defines as all animals…
and most plants, as well as physically and morally impaired
humans” (31). Tsiolkovskii included the “lowest races” (32)
of humans as worthy of extermination. Hagemeister calls his
version of cosmism as “monstrous” (33) and one can under-
stand why. At the very least the Russian space pioneer has to
be considered a full-blown crackpot who happened to produce
some important spaceflight ideas on the way. More than ever,
a full biography of Tsiolkovskii is needed that takes all three
primary obsessions—cosmism, spaceflight, and the metal air-
ship—equally seriously. 
Asif Siddiqi’s epilogue, “From Cosmic Enthusiasm to
Nostalgia for the Future: A Tale of Soviet Space Culture,” is
also important. He lays out the full trajectory of devolution of
space enthusiasm in the Soviet Union and Russia from space-
flight’s place in the revival of utopian hopes in the
Khrushchev period (at one point a communist utopia was
promised by 1980) to a post-Soviet “nostalgia for the future.”
He discusses the creation of a “‘usable past’” [sic] (289) by
Soviet space advocates (among other things through the cult
of Tsiolkovskii as a rational, scientific space pioneer) and its
post-collapse degeneration into often warring cults of person-
ality around various space industry figures like Korolev and
Valentin Glushko, as the secret history of the program’s
infighting was revealed. Nationalist nostalgia thus turned out
to be not just warm feelings about the glorious past.
Let me just mention three more articles here. Slava
Gerovitch’s discussion of the Korolev cult is noteworthy for
SOVIET SPACE CULTURE: COSMIC ENTHUSIASM IN SOCIALIST SOCIETIES
BOOK REVIEW
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Q U E S T   19:3    2012
67
THE SPACE SHUTTLE: CELEBRATING THIRTY YEARS OF NASA’S FIRST SPACE PLANE
BOOK REVIEW
By Piers Bizony
Zenith Press, 2011
ISBN 978-0-7603-3941-1
Pages:  300, illustrations
Price:  $40.00, hardcover
With the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 a slew
of books commemorating its 30-year flight history have either
already been published or are in the works. Many of these are
celebratory, and The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty Years of
NASA’s First Space Plane is certainly in that category; it offers
truth in advertising by even saying so in the title. Many of these
are well-illustrated large-format “coffee table” books, and this
book satisfies that need as well. Some of these works are
thoughtful and reflective, seeking to understand and explain
the Space Shuttle sojourn in the history of the space age. But
this book is not in that category, and I recommend you look
elsewhere for serious discussions of the program’s history. 
If you want pretty pictures, this book is adequate, but
there are a number of other books in a similar vein that I would
recommend. One of the most significant of these is Tony
Reichhardt’s compilation, Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years—
The Astronauts’ Experiences in Their Own Words (DK
Publishing, 2002), which contains not only stunning imagery
but also stories from 77 astronauts who have flown on the
Space Shuttle since 1981. Of course it does not include the last
few years of the Shuttle program.
But then again, neither does The Space Shuttle:
Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA’s First Space Plane. I am
perplexed by the decision to omit the last missions of the Space
Shuttle program, and I can only conclude that the publisher
chose to steal the march on other publishers seeking to produce
an illustrated history of the program by going to print before
that information was available. That is not a fatal flaw, but it is
a grating one. 
One flaw that I find more troubling is that author Piers
Bizony failed to offer much of anything in the way of serious
discussion about the program. While he has at the beginning of
each chapter a narrative about selected aspects of the Shuttle
history, the majority of the pages are dedicated to collections of
photographs on the various missions. Bizony also includes a
description of these missions and a few basic facts about each,
all easily found online. Sometimes these are lengthy discus-
sions, but for the Department of Defense classified missions
there is only a sentence or two; again, this is information easi-
ly obtained online. Piers Bizony is a talented and attentive ana-
lyst of the U.S. space program, and I am disappointed in what
is contained in this book on one of the mainstays of the
American human space effort.
Now that we have given the Space Shuttle an honorable
retirement after flying for 30 years, it is high time to record its
history in an honest, straightforward, and sophisticated man-
ner. We are not anywhere near the completion of this task, and
The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA’s First
Space Plane does not even begin to aid in furthering this
objective. I await others to pursue this important challenge in
capturing the complex and significant history of the Space
Shuttle. We must do so in the near term; beginning by inter-
viewing key personnel before the program fades too far into
history.
Roger D. Launius
National Air and Space Museum
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC
its in-depth exploration of one example of Russian memory
culture in the framework later elaborated by Siddiqi. Lina
Kohonen usefully examines the photographic representation
of cosmonauts in the major Soviet picture magazine Ogonek.
And editor Monica Rüthers discusses the role of spaceflight in
the post-Stalinist shaping of childhood comparatively, in the
Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. The edi-
tors’ introductions are in general helpful in describing the state
of the literature. In sum, Soviet Space Culture is a valuable
collection for those interested in Soviet space history and in
the cultural history of spaceflight. Unfortunately, as is too
often the case recently, it is priced at a level only university
libraries can afford.
Michael J. Neufeld 
National Air and Space Museum 
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC
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