Months passed. The spring of 1958 arrived. The dog Laika had been shot into the cosmic void. A good dog, a Russian, an Earthling. The Americans’ first launches had failed, and then in February they shot up a laughable sputnik no bigger than a grapefruit. Meanwhile we metallurgists forged ahead on the mighty RD-108 Supercluster paraffin-fueled engine, which would lift our first cosmonaut into the Infinite. There were technical snags, and gross lapses in space-worker ideology, but much progress was made.