The Eagle has landed

"Kampen om rymden" (The struggle for space) is a relatively short book by Björn Lundberg, a Swedish historian. It deals with the conquest of space, or rather the space race between the two superpowers. 

And that´s precisely the point! 

If there is any main character in the story, it´s not Neil Armstrong but rather Wernher von Braun. Perhaps we could call him an anti-hero? The book traces the space race back to World War II and the Nazi attempts to build a miracle weapon. In a sense, they did: the notorious V2 rockets. After the war, both the Americans and the Soviets raced to get their hands on what was left of the Nazi projects. I suppose the US got the jackpot in the form of Wernher von Braun himself! Another point strongly emphasized in "Kampen om rymden" is that the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was driving the civilian space programs of both nations. The real goal was military control of space, or at least a military presence there. 

As far as I can tell, the book deals shortly and succintly with all the major turning points in our space odyssey: the often quite kookish people who believed in space rockets long before it became fashionable to do so, Operation Paperclip, "the Sputnik shock", Laika, Gagarin, the charismatic John Glenn, the Apollo project, the space shuttles and space stations, Reagan´s Star Wars... 

One thing dealt with only in passing are the unmanned probes to other planets. There is also a short section on the conspiracy theory that the US never reached the Moon. The author has difficulty taking the "theory" seriously, but it *is* a real thing in some fringe circles. And speaking of kooks, although Lundberg does describe the Soviet space program in several chapters, he never mentions the Cosmists. He also has an annoying tendency to treat the terms Russia/Russian as interchangable with Soviet Union/Soviet, something that leads him into trouble when describing - guess what - post-Soviet Russia.

An intriguing twist with "Kampen om rymden" is that the author doesn´t seem to believe that our destiny lies in the stars (or at the very least the red dunes of Mars). To Lundberg, the main legacy of the space programs is the realization that Earth is an extremely small pale blue dot in a vast, cold, dead and unforgiving universe. There´s not much to see or do even on the Moon! He ends, not by bemoaning that the Mars mission has been cancelled, but rather by stating that it´s probably more important to save life on Earth than to spend enormous sums of money on roaming a vast emptiness for no good reason...

It seems the Eagle has finally landed.