Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for 1986, this highly acclaimed study approaches the space race as a problem in comparative public policy. Drawing on published literature, archival sources in both the United States and Europe, interviews with many of the key participants, and important declassified material, such as the National Security Council's first policy paper on space, McDougall examines US, European, and Soviet space programmes and their politics. Opening with a short account of Nikolai Kibalchich, a late 19th-century Russian rocketry theoretician, McDougall argues that the Soviet Union made its way into space first becaude it was the world's first "technocracy" - which he defines as "the institutionalization of technological change for state purpose". He also explores the growth of a political economy of technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States.