The Wrong Stuff

A witty history of the surprisingly ridiculous and ramshackle Soviet space program.

“A brisk, rip-roaring account.” —The Wall Street Journal

The Space Race should have been over before it started. The USSR was battered from World War II and up against an ascendant United States. Nevertheless, the Soviets scored a series of victories―starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik―that seemed to accomplish the impossible.

Yet as John Strausbaugh shows, these were PR victories as much as scientific ones. The reality was less impressive and much more farcical. The Soviet supply chain was a disaster, and many machines barely worked. The cosmonauts aboard the iconic Vostok 1 rocket had to remove their space suits just to fit inside. Soviet scientists, under intense government pressure, had essentially made their rockets out of spit and Band-Aids.

The Wrong Stuff is a vivid and entertaining journey beyond the Iron Curtain, revealing the dysfunctional reality behind the Soviet Union’s seemingly ingenious space program.

• “A brisk, rip-roaring account of the Soviet side of the space race . . . Mr. Strausbaugh’s style is appealingly sardonic, amusing and a touch gonzo. The author has a sharp eye for the bizarre, which lends itself nicely to a story of remarkable dysfunction and remarkable achievement, told against a background where the darkness is not only that of space.” 
  Wall Street Journal
• “I love this book. This is a harrowing and hilarious account of a history that I will admit as a space geek I knew absolutely nothing about.” 
  Shane Harris, author of @War
• “Highly entertaining . . . The Wrong Stuff is the right choice for readers fascinated by space and the human absurdities that propel us there.” 
  Shelf Awareness
• “Strausbaugh’s writing is engaging and full of anecdotes that both reveal the humanity of the cosmonauts and the calamities of a space program operating under Soviet communism.” 
  Quest
• “Strausbaugh tells this extraordinary tale in a chatty, familiar voice that adds to the ironies of historical Soviet extraterrestrial adventuring.” 
  Booklist
• “Strausbaugh’s droll sense of humor fits well with this examination of the Soviet space program . . . [He] clearly enjoyed writing this entertaining book, an accessible, engaging story about an era that, for better or worse, is nearly forgotten.” 
  Kirkus
• "Strausbaugh paints an amusing portrait of rockets and spacecrafts held together with little more than bubblegum and shoe strings—and tight-lipped publicity campaigns." 
  New York Post