Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and International Prestige

摘要

When I first heard of this book, I wondered what the author had to offer that was new on such a well-worn topic. After reading it, I am still wondering. Almost thirty years ago, Walter McDougall's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985) covered the same ground, albeit in a larger framework than offered by Mieczkowski. Twenty years ago, Robert Divine published The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite (1993), although he examined the period only from Sputnik l's launch in October 1957 up to the end of 1958. (Mieczkowski covers the president's two terms and beyond.) There are also a number of articles on Eisenhower's space policy, notably by David Cal-lahan and Fred Greenstein in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, edited by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy (1997).