Stephen Walker | Beyond | Talks at Google

Stephen Walker discusses his book "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space". April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian by the name of Yuri Gagarin sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile and blasts into the skies. Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour, Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows he sees the earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing he has become a world celebrity- the first human to leave the planet. "Beyond" tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its sixtieth anniversary. It happened at the height of the Cold War as the US and USSR confronted each other across an Iron Curtain. Both superpowers took enormous risks to get a man into space first – the Americans in the full glare of the media, the Soviets under deep cover. Drawing on extensive original research and the vivid testimonies of eyewitnesses, many of whom have never spoken before, Stephen Walker unpacks secrets that were hidden for decades and takes the reader into the drama of one of humanity's greatest adventures – featuring the scientists, engineers and political leaders on both sides, and above all the American astronauts and their Soviet rivals battling for supremacy in the heavens. Stephen Walker has a BA in History from Oxford and an MA in the History of Science from Harvard. His previous book "Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima" was a New York Times bestseller and is in development as a movie for Working Title Films, to be directed by Cary Fukunaga with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard. He is also an award-winning documentary director – his films have won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Rose d’Or, Europe’s most prestigious documentary award. Get the bo