Those rockets were, like, BIG

Beloved and I have been watching a documentary series on the ABC called Space Race. Over four Sunday nights it dramatised the US and Soviet rocket programs from WWII until the Moon landing. Unlike "The Right Stuff" it didn't just show the Americans astronauts being all Alpha type ultra competitives. It was mostly about the engineers who built the rockets - Wernher von Braun for the US and the long unknown Soviet Chief Designer, Korolev and their respective struggles with technical problems and politicians. With less good actors it would have been sentimental tosh or worse. As it was it was, it was great telly.

Now, I guess I've been a bit blase about space. All the exciting stuff happened before I was born. Actual space travel isn't a patch on the dodgiest sci-fi show. It wasn't until last year that I found out that that annoying beep Sputnik made didn't actually mean anything except "listen, I'm in SPACE!" and I was like "so who cares?" But this series showing how the rockets started as bomb delivery systems really made me think what an incredibly brave person you'd have to be to sit on top of one of them to go into space and not worry about being blown to kingdom come.

Last night they showed the Moon mission. We've all seen that footage of Apollo taking off so many times that it's part of our cultural wallpaper. So, yawn. Big rocket, Cape Canaveral full of ugly Americans with their shirts off looking up. I wasn't really paying attention until the narrator mentioned that the rocket was the height of a 36 storey building.

36 storeys.

That's big.

After the third week, which was about Gagarin going on the first manned space flight, Beloved remembered he had a biography of him called Starman and insisted I read. I was reluctant because I didn't want to spoil the series (after all, how could I be sure the Russians wouldn't get to the moon?) but in the end couldn't resist. It was really good. Published in 1998 when most of the participants were still alive but after the fall of the Soviet Union so all the secrets could come tumbling out, it showed how being the first cosmonaut was both a huge honour but a terrible prison for Comrade Gagarin. Well worth a read.