Asif Azam Siddiqi

Who is Asif Azam Siddiqi?

Asif Azam Siddiqi is a Bangladeshi American space historian. He is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. He specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history. He has written several books on the history of space exploration. His most recent book The Rockets' Red Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 recovered the social and cultural roots of cosmic enthusiasm in the Russian context dating back to the 19th century.

His first book Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 is widely considered to be the best English-language history of the Soviet space program in print and was identified by the Wall Street Journal as "one of the five best books" on space exploration. This book was later published in paperback in two separate volumes, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo.

Siddiqi's major contribution to space history scholarship has been to apply academic training, theory, and methodology to the study of Soviet space program history. Siddiqi utilized newly available archival materials from Russia, published works such as memoirs, and other sources and essentially pioneered Soviet space history scholarship in the post Cold War-era. Even current Russian-based space history tends to rely heavily upon memoirs and as a result Siddiqi is acknowledged by Russian space officials as one of the few people conducting original archival research on the subject worldwide. His articles have been published in the leading Russian space journal Novosti kosmonavtiki as well as the official history journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki. He also regularly publishes pieces in the Moscow English language daily, Moscow Times.