“And take action.”
A long silence. “Yes. To take action.”
“Suppose the Soviet Union had reached the Moon first—”
“It would have meant a lot of parades in our country, and a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in yours. We would have then spent millions or billions more rubles, and then abandoned the whole business. Perhaps Americans would still be going to the Moon today. Or you would have gone to Mars first. Beat the Reds to the Red Planet, hmmm?” He smiled. “We can’t change the past. We can barely change the future!”
At that moment, I put aside all my doubts, all my questions, and allowed myself to believe in Yuri Ribko. He had changed the world, and changed it for the better. How many of us ever can or will know that?
The door opened, and a pretty, dark-haired, gray-eyed woman in her fifties entered carrying a shopping bag. “Marina,” Yuri said, leaping up to greet her. “Meet my friend!”
Acknowledgments
Red Moon is a work of fiction, but is inspired by the remarkable series of steps and missteps that caused the Soviet Union to lose the Moon race to the United States. Yuri Ribko, his family and friends and their activities are my inventions.
I was able to re-create some events, notably the horrifying end of Soyuz 1 and the later crash of Yuri Gagarin, thanks to the diaries of General Nikolai P. Kamanin, three volumes of which have been published in Russian under the title Skriti Kosmos (Secret Space). Kamanin’s astonishingly frank, inside account of the Soviet manned space program deserves a wide readership and I hope Red Moon will inspire some enterprising organization to translate and publish the entire work.
I am also greatly indebted to Raketi i Ludi (Missiles and People), a four-volume memoir by Boris Chertok, one of the late Sergei Korolev’s deputies, about his fifty-year career in the Energiya organization. This book is as frank and open as Kamanin’s diaries, and also deserves wider distribution.
Roads to Space (New York: McGraw Hill/Aviation Week Group, 1995, John Rhea, editor), a collection of shorter memoirs from various Soviet space and missile engineers, provided several anecdotes and bits of local color.
A number of individuals deserve my public appreciation, beginning with Charles P. Vick, for years one of the world’s foremost authorities on Soviet space programs, especially Program L-1/L-3. Charles generously provided me with facts, figures, drawings, and other materials while patiently answering endless questions. Thank you, Charles.
I personally interviewed a number of cosmonauts from the Korolev design bureau and from Star Town who shared their insights. Bert Vis also provided many more anecdotes from his extensive series of cosmonaut interviews. Bart Hendrickx provided key translations. Rex Hall offered his support.
G. Harry Stine and James Oberg inspired my original interest in the Soviet space program. Jennifer Green and the Friends and Partners in Space Workshop of 1997 allowed me to visit the Russian locations of this long-planned story in the excellent company of historians such as David Woods, Dennis Newkirk, and Glen Swanson, in addition to several named above.
Finally, special thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis, and to my editor, Beth Meacham.
M. C.
Los Angeles, August 1999