Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race,