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Crisis aboard the Mir
On February 12, 1997, two Russian cosmonauts joined an American
astronaut on board the only permanent manned outpost in space, the
dilapidated, eleven-year-old Mir space station.
It was to be a routine mission, the fourth of seven trips to Mir
that NASA astronauts would take as "dress rehearsals" for the two
countries' partnership in a new International Space Station they
were building back on Earth.
But there had been bad omens: a Moscow psychic who predicted a mysterious
disaster; a Russian doctor who warned that the crew was psychologically
incompatible. Within two weeks the omens were borne out, as the
three men were suddenly forced to fight the worst fire in space
history.
This was only the beginning of what would become the most dangerous
mission in the thirty-six-year history of manned space travel--an
epic, six-month misadventure that would climax in the most harrowing
accident man has faced in space since Apollo 13. In Dragonfly, bestselling
author Bryan Burrough tells for the first time the incredible true
story of how a joint Russian-American crew narrowly survived almost
every trauma an astronaut could imagine: fire, power blackouts,
chemical leaks, docking failures, nail-biting spacewalks, and constant
mechanical breakdowns, all climaxing in a dramatic midspace collision
that left everyone on board scrambling for their lives.
Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the cosmonauts, astronauts,
Russian and American ground controllers, psychologists, and scientists
involved, Dragonfly is the saga of a mission as fraught with political
and bureaucratic intrigues as any Washington potboiler. Using never-before-released
internal NASA memoranda, flight logs, and debriefings, Burrough
vividly portrays an American space program in which many astronauts
refuse to raise safety concerns for fear they will be frozen out
of future missions. It offers an unprecedented look inside the rattletrap
Russian space program, where the desperate thirst for hard currency
leads to safety shortcuts and exhausted, puppetlike cosmonauts endure
truly inhuman pressures from their unfeeling, all-powerful masters
on the ground.
In Dragonfly, for the first time, the American astronauts who journeyed
to Mir speak out bluntly about the failings of the program, from
the rigors of training at Russia's Star City military base to the
slapdash experiments they were required to perform in space. Yet
through it all the men and women of the Russian and American programs
persevered, forging friendships that will serve them well as the
two countries prepare for the first launches of the International
Space Station in late 1998. Theirs is a classic story of a triumph
over adversity, destined to be one of the most enduring and widely
celebrated adventure stories of our time.
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