Dr. Asif Siddiqi

Asif Siddiqi is a professor of History at Fordham University in New York. He has written widely on the history of space exploration. His first book, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 was published by NASA in 2000 was based on many years of primary source research, and is considered to be the definitive work on the history of the Soviet space program. Since then he has written and edited many books and articles on the history of space, on the Soviet and Russian programs, on deep space exploration, the history of spaceflight culture, and more recently, on the Indian space program. He was a member of the National Research Council's "Committee on Human Spaceflight" for the past couple of years. The Committee, on assignment from the U.S. Congress prepared a substantive report on the future of U.S. human spaceflight that was delivered to both NASA and Congress in the Summer of 2014.