Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Soaring to the Stars (1967)




Andreev, N. Illustrated by Arkadiy Lurie. Soaring to the stars. Moscow. 44 pp. Softcover. 1967

A children's book dedicated to the life and space flight of the Cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev, who was part of the Vostok 3-4 group mission. The first duel cosmonaut  mission.

From Wikipedia:

Vostok 3 (Russian: Восток-3, Orient 3 or East 3) was a spaceflight of the Soviet space program intended to determine the ability of the human body to function in conditions of weightlessness and test the endurance of the Vostok 3KA spacecraft over longer flights. It orbited the Earth 64 times over nearly four days in space, August 11–15, 1962, a feat which would not be matched by NASA until the Gemini program (1965–1966).

Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 were launched a day apart on trajectories that brought the spacecraft within approximately 6.5 km (4.0 mi) of one another. The cosmonauts aboard the two capsules also communicated with each other via radio, the first ship-to-ship communications in space. These missions marked the first time that more than one manned spacecraft was in orbit at the same time, giving Soviet mission controllers the opportunity to learn to manage this scenario.

The colorful paintings in this book make this more than a simple piece of propaganda. this is very similar to similar books that show the lives of the US astronauts, as simplified for children like this one from 1963:


This book celebrates Andriyan Nikolayev's life with showing how he grew up and how he became a Cosmonaut.


It goes on to not only show the launch of his Vostok 3 mission....

 But ends with how this was just the first step in many more Soviet missions to come.



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