by Matthew Brzezinski.

Times Books. 318 pages. $26.

By G. Wayne Miller
Journal Staff Writer

Fifty years ago this Thursday, a rocket carrying a 184-pound steel sphere with a rudimentary radio transmitter lifted off from a secret base in the central Soviet Union. Just over an hour and a half later, the PS-1 satellite — Sputnik, as it would be popularly known — became the first manmade object to orbit the earth. The space race had begun, and humanity was changed forever.

The anniversary has prompted several new books and new editions, but the best is Matthew Brzezinski’s Red Moon Rising. Like all fine narrative nonfiction, this thoroughly researched and lyrically rendered book reads like a novel, with a compelling cast of heroes and villains, and drama from beginning to end. Brzezinski, a former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, begins his account with the launch on Sept. 8, 1944, of a V-2 rocket, the world’s first ballistic missile, which Hitler hoped would reverse Germany’s fortunes. It is a powerful passage, richly detailed and combining technical knowledge with cinematic action in a fast-paced style that is the hallmark of this book. The war ends, and the U.S. and USSR divide the spoils — people, materials and blueprints — of Germany’s brilliant rocket engineering program. Americans and Soviets set out to improve the range and power of their missiles — the goal, of course, being the ability to reach the other’s shores.

The brilliant, obsessive, obsessed scientist Sergei Korolev will steer the Soviet Union to its success on Oct. 4, 1957; his counterpart, Army Gen. John Bruce Medaris, will guide America to its first satellite launch, more than three months later. Medaris’ key scientist was Wernher von Braun, creator of the V-2, the German who sold his soul — first to Hitler, then to America — for the chance to realize his space dreams. Von Braun also became a favorite of Walt Disney, in one of the many bizarre-but-true passages of the book that brings to mind Stanley Kubrick.

America is led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the great general who by 1957 was in declining health and on the downward slope of his political career — a man who would rather golf than lead. His Soviet counterpart is Nikita Khrushchev, the peasant-born Communist who survived Stalin to become head of an economically ravaged nation that lived in fear of the mighty U.S., with its growing fleet of long-range, nuclear-bomb-carrying aircraft that Sputnik immediately diminished.

But the true principal characters during this early stage of the Cold War are the USSR and America. Brzezinski depicts both as paranoid, bungling and bureaucratic, neither truly comprehending the new era they are ushering in with their new-fangled machines. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction became reality not long after Sputnik, and the genie was out of the bottle, as Iran now reminds us.

In the long run, America, stunned by its peasant-led enemy’s first satellite launch, went on to “win” the space race, when Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, 12 years later. Today, of course, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union lies on the dustbin of history (as Trotsky might have put it), and Russia and America are partners in the International Space Station. American drivers navigate with satellite-based GPS computers, and global communications are instantaneous. Thank you, Sputnik (I think).

Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who lives in Rhode Island, was a major contributor to Red Moon Rising. He also wrote the informative foreword to another Sputnik-inspired book: National Geographic’s Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race. Amply illustrated and smartly written, Epic Rivalry covers a longer period than Red Moon.

For narrative power that ranks with Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action and Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, masterpieces both, Red Moon Rising is the must-read Sputnik book.

gwmiller@projo.com