A recent NASA history of the Soviet human space flight
program will receive the Emme Award for Astronautical
Literature at the March 20 luncheon of the Goddard Memorial
Symposium, sponsored by the American Astronautical Society.
The pathbreaking study, titled “Challenge to Apollo: The
Soviet Race to the Moon, 1945-1974,” by Asif A. Siddiqi, is
the first comprehensive history of the Soviet human space
flight program since the opening of the archives in the early
1990s. In the volume the author goes beyond the basic facts
and weaves together broad themes, including a challenge to
Western conventional wisdom that the Soviets always tended
toward incremental — rather than revolutionary —
technological innovation.
Named in honor of the first NASA Historian, Eugene Emme, the
Emme award was created in 1982 to annually recognize an
outstanding book that increases public understanding of the
past and potential impact of the field of astronautics.
Details on ordering the book can be found at:
http://history.nasa.gov/gpo/order.html
