"This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling
piece of storytelling. . . . It is high definition history: tight,
thrilling and beautifully researched."--The Times, London, Front Page
Lead Review
"Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly
embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men
and women brought sympathetically, and sometimes tragically, to
life."--Colin Thubron, author of Shadow of the Silk Road
09.07 am. April 12, 1961. A top secret rocket site in the USSR. A
young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's
most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile--originally designed to
carry a nuclear warhead--and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri
Gagarin. And he is about to make history.
Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour--ten times faster than a
rifle bullet--Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his
windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a
sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its
fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his
landing he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the
planet.
Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th
anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and
USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took
enormous risks to get a man into space first, the Americans in the full
glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Both trained their
teams of astronauts to the edges of the endurable. In the end the race
between them would come down to the wire.
Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimony of
eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker
unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into
the drama of one of humanity's greatest adventures - to the scientists,
engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all to the
American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in
the heavens.
