Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age

For the fiftieth anniversary of Sputnik, the behind-the-scenes story of the fierce battles on Earth that launched the superpowers into space.

The spy planes were driving Nikita Khrushchev mad. Whenever America wanted to peer inside the Soviet Union, it launched a U-2, which flew too high to be shot down. But Sergei Korolev, Russia's chief rocket designer, had a solution. On October 4, 1957, the launch of Korolev's satellite, Sputnik, stunned the world.

In Red Moon Rising, Matthew Brzezinski draws on original interviews and new documentary sources from both sides of the Cold War divide. He shows how Khrushchev and U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower were buffeted by crises of their own creation, leaving the door open to ambitious politicians to squabble over the heavens and the earth.

The true story of the birth of the space age has never been told in such dramatic detail, and Red Moon Rising brings it vividly and memorably to life.