Reviews for Energy, Simulation Training, Ocean Engineering: Research Papers of the Link Foundation Fellows, Vol. 2

The average rating for Energy, Simulation Training, Ocean Engineering: Research Papers of the Link Foundation Fellows, Vol. 2 based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-27 00:00:00 Paul Sobel Roald Sagdeev was born in 1932 in Moscow to Tatar Communist parents who named him after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen. When Sagdeev was 4, his family moved to the Tatar Autonomous Republic, which was where he graduated from high school. After that he studied at the Department of Physics of Moscow State University. After graduating, Sagdeev went on to work at the Kurchatov Institute, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, on plasma physics, where he interacted with many famous Soviet scientists such as Igor Kurchatov and Lev Artsimovich; Sagdeev writes a great deal about them; he even named his son, who was born a few days after Kurchatov's death, after Kurchatov. In the 1960s, Sagdeev worked on nuclear fusion using tokamaks in Novosibirsk, and produced outstanding scientific work, and in 1968 was elected a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1973, at rocket scientist Mstislav Keldysh's suggestion, Sagdeev became the director of the Space Research Institute, which represented the Academy in the Soviet space establishment. It was this institute that sent unmanned Soviet probes to Mars, Venus, Halley's Comet and Phobos. It also arranged the Soyuz-Apollo mission, "the world's most expensive handshake" in honor of the policy of detente between the two Cold War superpowers. In the 1980s Sagdeev advised Gorbachev during arms-control negotiations. This book has a great deal of insider information about Soviet nuclear science, space program and arms control, but as always with such specialized books, only someone more familiar with the topics could place this information in proper context. I was impressed with Sagdeev's version of the decision to make the Soviet Space Shuttle clone Buran. The final argument was made by Dmitry Ustinov, the Soviet Minister of Defense: the Americans are a pragmatic people; if they are spending massive sums of money on the shuttle, they must see something we do not; we must be ready for that eventuality, whatever it is. Sagdeev also thinks that Boris Babayan, the designer of the Soviet Elbrus-2 supercomputer, did not deserve his Lenin Prize, and that his creation was not really a supercomputer. Sagdeev's old friend atomic-bomb designer Yuli Khariton told him that the Elbrus-2 was "not a supercomputer at all." Strange: the Elbrus-2 was about 15 times slower than the Cray-2, which came out at about the same time, but this does not make it not a supercomputer. During the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the authorities ordered all Soviet space workers, from the Baikonur launch complex to the Kaliningrad mission control center, to tell the Americans that they reported to Sagdeev's Institute of Space Research; Sagdeev says that he felt like Marquis de Carabas in Charles Perrault's "Puss in Boots". Overall, this book reads like supporting material for Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, and the author looks like a composite of several characters of that book.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-18 00:00:00 Paul Martin Sagdeev's autobiography is a warm, enjoyable and surprising window into the history of Soviet science, and indirectly of the Soviet Union itself. Viewing this history from the perspective of a scientist provides an accessibility to the material, and Sagdeev's dry humor keeps it alive. Most interesting were the chapters on the Soviet (scientific) space program, whose "issues" are remarkably similar to those of the US civil space program, both past and present. Whether in the interplay between aerospace industry and national space policy (and programs), competition between human and robotic spaceflight, the role of civil space in international diplomacy, the crushing micromanagement of programs by bureaucracies at the top, the development of large programs before the identification of mission requirements, or the nepotistic promotion of technological "miracle cures" which lack technical credibility or community endorsement to senior officials, Sagdeev's Soviet civil space program will sound hauntingly familiar to those familiar with the U.S. program. Sagdeev's balancing act as "forward and alternative thinker", yet not full blown Sakharov dissident, also provides a unique vantage into exactly how far the Soviet system could be challenged from within. The only weakness of this book is that it draws to a somewhat hurried conclusion which disrupts an otherwise strong and fairly linear narrative through most decades of the 20th century. The final chapters cover interesting material but lose focus and flow, regrettable as they cover critical periods in the 1980s as the Soviet Union drew to a close. Overall, I found this book to be a surprising and welcome "find" which should be of interest to for either scientifically or historically minded readers.