The Heavens and the Earth Study Guide

by Walter A. McDougall

About 75 pages (22,504 words)

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The Heavens and the Earth Study Guide consists of approx. 75 pages of summaries and analysis on The Heavens and the Earth by Walter A. McDougall. Browse the literature study guide below:

Part I begins with the death of Tsar Alexander II, blown up by a bomb from the chemistry lab of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute that his own father had founded. At this time, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was already writing about rocketry and gravity and trying to design rocket ships. He is known as the father of modern cosmonautics. Even backward Russia was active in work on aviation and rocketry in the years before World War I and the Russian Revolution. (read more)

Part 1: Chapter 1, The Human Seed and Social Soil: Rocketry and Revolution

Part 1: Chapter 2, Political Rains and First Fruit: The Cold War and Sputnik

Part 2: Chapter 3, Bashful Behemoth: Technology, the State, and the Birth of Deterrence

Part 2: Chapter 4, While Waiting for Technocracy: the ICBM and the First American Space Program

Part 2: Chapter 5, The Satellite Decision

Part 3: Chapter 6, "A New Era of History" and a Media Riot

Part 3: Chapter 7, The Birth of NASA

Part 3: Chapter 8, A Space Strategy for the United States

Part 3: Chapter 9, Sparrow in the Falcon's Nest

Part 3: Chapter 10, The Shape of Things to Come

Part 4: Parabolic Ballad: Khrushchev and the Setting of Soviet Space Policy

Part 4: Chapter 11, Party Line