Yuri Gagarin – poster boy of manned space flight

To an observant outsider, the Soviets might have appeared to have developed an oddly intolerant attitude towards stray dogs. Every so often throughout the late 1950s, a fresh pack of homeless mongrel bitches was picked off the streets of Moscow and transported to a remote region of Kazakhstan, where they were promptly strapped into the nose of a ballistic missile and fired into space. If they survived till re-entry, they would likely be blown up by a remotely detonated on-board bomb designed to prevent their earthbound remains from falling into enemy territory. It was, as the phrase goes, a dog’s life.

This elaborate and rather costly method of canine population control was one of only a very few signs that the Soviets planned imminently to put a man in space. In fact the Soviet space programme that launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961 didn’t officially exist until it had triumphed. One of the lessons of Stephen Walker’s Beyond is that it was the USSR’s long-standing commitment to dissimulation, its institutional paranoia and devotion to concealment, almost for its own sake, that won it a decisive advantage in the early space race. It was, the secret of their success, so to speak.

The Americans found themselves at the losing end of an asymmetric information problem. For example, the major design flaw of the American Mercury rockets was that they kept on blowing up — or, as in November 1960, soaring four inches into the air, then blowing up and toppling towards the VIP area at Cape Canaveral ‘like an incoming shell’. And when they did, Soviet space programmers could read about it the next day in the New York Times. Soviet failures, on the other hand, became automatic state secrets, or, on occasion, were imaginatively re-described, as when Luna-1 swiftly bypassed its destination (the moon) and began to orbit the sun in what Khrushchev defiantly hailed ‘one of the greatest achievements of the cosmic era’.