Space Race: the untold story of two rivals and their struggle for the moon
Deborah Cadbury Fourth Estate, 372pp, £20
ISBN 0007209959

There were two space races, both of them won by America. One was the civilian/scientific race that ended when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon in 1969. The other was the military race that ended 20 years later with the collapse of communism, following Mikhail Gorbachev's realisation that the Soviet Union had no hope of competing with the US technologically or financially.

Now there is no race and precious little space. Nasa's insane loyalty to the shuttle has all but put America out of the manned space flight business. The Russians and the Europeans have reliable launchers, but little enthusiasm for anything beyond earth orbit, or involving people. Perhaps the best hope for the manned space flight geeks will be a new contest between India and China, but don't hold your breath. At the national level, space just isn't happening any more.

One effect of this is to distance us from the cold war years, when the "high frontier" seemed to be the only possible future, in peace or in war. The battles between Apollo and Soyuz have taken on a historical, even quaint, air. Then they seemed like the first steps to the stars; now they just look like further additions to the annals of human perversity. Yet real heroism was involved. The Right Stuff - both Tom Wolfe's book and Philip Kaufman's immensely moving film - captured the amazing courage of the men, from Chuck Yeager to "Gordo" ("Hot Dog") Cooper, who took America to the threshold of space. But it was a one-sided tale. The Soviets, whose successes first with Sputnik and then with Yuri Gagarin goaded the Americans into competing and ultimately winning, appeared only in the background in the film. Among them was a mysterious man in a hat, blurred by the rocket plume, but evidently laughing at his own brilliance. That man was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, chief architect of the Soviet space programme.

For years, Korolev's identity was kept secret, and he was known only as the Chief Designer. Finally, his name was made public, and in death he became first a Soviet and then a Russian hero. This is something for which readers of Deborah Cadbury's book should be grateful. Putting a face and personality to the Soviet space effort makes for a much better story.

Space Race covers the period from 1945, when both the Soviets and the US seized the very advanced German V2 rockets (used to launch ballistic missiles during the Second World War), until the moon landing of 1969. This period was dominated by Korolev on the Soviet side and, on the US side, by Wernher von Braun, designer of the V2s and of the mighty and beautiful Saturn V rockets that were to take men to the moon. Cadbury is concerned only tangentially with the military side of the story, and instead pursues the unambiguous thrills of the scientific programmes. This is fair enough: we can take it as read that all this technological effort had military applications, but the mere fact that a rocket could carry a nuclear warhead is not particularly interesting.

It immediately becomes clear that the space race was as much a personal as a national contest. Von Braun may not have known who Korolev was, but he knew there was somebody extraordinarily clever at work at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Von Braun's most potent argument, when attempting to wheedle money out of the US government in the 1950s, was the increasing evidence that the Soviets were very good at rocketry.

Von Braun himself was an extremely high-profile figure, partly because of his efforts to enlist the American people to his cause, and partly because of his profound moral ambiguity. The V2s had been built using slave labour; there had been countless deaths. Repeated moves were made to convict von Braun as a war criminal but, in the end, his value to the Americans ensured his survival. Cadbury is uncertain whether, if tried, he would have been found guilty, but her research suggests that he would.

Korolev's political background was even stranger. In the 1930s, he had been a victim of a Stalin-era purge. He escaped execution by a whisker, but was sent to a prison camp in Siberia. Miraculously, he was reprieved and, even more miraculously, the experience does not seem to have soured his view of Stalin or of communism.

Korolev's early career may not have been as morally dubious as von Braun's, but he went on to serve a far more terrible ideology than US capitalism. Yet, in fact, neither man was politically driven. Both were space dreamers. They simply wanted to get to the moon and beyond. And both had engineering imaginations. They were not theoreticians, but practical men who knew how to fix a valve or a weld. This was important, because the appalling obstacles to building large rockets could only have been surmounted by engineers.

Despite this, both men had to play at politics to get what they wanted. At first, von Braun had the most problems. The Eisenhower administration was sceptical about space exploration, and von Braun was obliged to engage in some very undignified self-publicising - appearing on television, writing books - to sell the idea to the people. Once the Soviets launched the first unmanned space missions in the late 1950s, however, the US government needed no further convincing that America needed to get in on the game. In 1961, Kennedy committed to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and from that point onwards the money and the talent poured in.

For Korolev, by contrast, the 1950s were good and the 1960s were bad. Getting to Yuri Gagarin's first orbit (in 1961) was troublesome, but there was clear government backing. After that, the Soviet programme was beset by internal squabbling and cash shortages. Newly unearthed material has allowed Cadbury to get to the truth of the Soviet side of the story. Unlike the Americans, the Soviets were allowed to cover up their disasters (of which there were plenty). Furthermore, it is now clear that, in spite of American fears, there was little chance of the Russians being the first to land on the moon. Their rockets weren't working and there was no coherent programme.

One curious irony is that, in the years since the events described in this book, the positions of the two countries seem in effect to have reversed. Because of the sheer quality of Korolev's designs, Russian launchers are the most reliable there are. Nasa, meanwhile, has become a paralysed, Soviet-style bureaucracy and is barely able to continue its manned space programme. In the end, it was not the money that mattered, but the engineering.

Cadbury's account is lucid, pacy and readable. Yet there is something mechanical about the book. Her prose verges on the impersonal and occasionally slips into autopilot awfulness: "The Third Reich was doomed, crumbling into the dust of history", for instance, is a terrible piece of hackery. Moreover, the book suffers from a lack of a point of view. Wolfe brought to his version of the space race both a zippy, engaged prose style and a strong sense of what he was trying to do. His book was only on the surface about space; underneath, it was about male virtue. There is no such subtext in Space Race. Cadbury just tells the story and describes the main characters. I suspect that many readers will forget this book, even if they remember the story it tells.

What they certainly will remember are von Braun and Korolev, two engineering romantics who, with Gagarin's first flight and the awesome spectacle of a Saturn V lift-off, succeeded in doing something memorable, haunting, beautiful but, in the end, futile. Space, despite their efforts, remains the great beyond.

Bryan Appleyard's most recent book is Aliens: why they are here (Scribner)

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