I look forward to reading the book.

Raoul and others should also realize that many of the facts of this dramatic and heroic accomplishment (and others) were deliberately withheld, overlooked, even lied about by the principal players, and only were extracted after years of bitter argument, lonely and unappreciated scholarship, and persistent detective work by space historians who were instrumental in compelling the Soviets to grudgingly, slowly, resentfully dribble out accurate data about this and other praise-worthy but astronomically propagandized events.

The pages of 'Spaceflight', the monthly of the British Interplanetary Society, comprised the main field of honor for this work.

There were some Western space historians who took the position that the Soviet official accounts were fully worthy of credibility and that doubters were scurrilous politically-motivated mud-throwers who deserved disdain and intellectual shunning -- their names, those who swallowed the "Moscow line", have faded forever from the minds of today's space enthusiasts, and rightfully so.

But their way of thinking still abounds in other arenas of international scholarship. Lessons of the past, therefore, remain relevant to current issues.

Jim O
www.jamesoberg.com