Sarah Keegan
Headquarters, Washington                  March 18, 2002
(Phone: 202/358-1902)

RELEASE: 02-56

NASA HISTORY VOLUME TO RECEIVE EMME AWARD

     A recent NASA history of the Soviet human space flight 
program will receive the Emme Award for Astronautical 
Literature at the March 20 luncheon of the Goddard Memorial 
Symposium, sponsored by the American Astronautical Society.

The pathbreaking study, titled "Challenge to Apollo: The 
Soviet Race to the Moon, 1945-1974," by Asif A. Siddiqi, is 
the first comprehensive history of the Soviet human space 
flight program since the opening of the archives in the early 
1990s. In the volume the author goes beyond the basic facts 
and weaves together broad themes, including a challenge to 
Western conventional wisdom that the Soviets always tended 
toward incremental -- rather than revolutionary -- 
technological innovation.

Named in honor of the first NASA Historian,  Eugene Emme, the 
Emme award was created in 1982 to annually recognize an 
outstanding book that increases public understanding of the 
past and potential impact of the field of astronautics. 

Details on ordering the book can be found at: 
http://history.nasa.gov/gpo/order.html

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