Aboard Mir, nearly lost in space

Author: By Alex Beam, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, December 20, 1998

Page: K2

Section: Books

NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir
By Bryan Burrough. HarperCollins. 528 pp. Illustrated. $26.95

For a subject of such cosmic importance (sorry), there is precious little Grade-A journalism about space exploration. The New Yorker's Henry Cooper wrote a brilliant pair of articles about the near-mutiny on board Skylab. Tom Wolfe hit the mark in ``The Right Stuff,'' and ``Apollo 13,'' co-written by commander Jim Lovell and Jeffery Kluger, is superb. Add one more work to that list: ``Dragonfly,'' Bryan Burrough's account of the troubled US-Russian collaboration on board the Mir space station.

I'm embarrassed by how much I enjoyed this book. Many years ago, when a talented magazine writer wrote a 600-page book about Sears, Roebuck & Co., one of his friends remarked, uncharitably: ``He thought he was writing a book about America, but he ended up writing a book about Sears.'' With ``Dragonfly,'' it is just the opposite. Burrough writes brilliantly about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Russian space program, but his story transcends the details of the subject at hand. Just as Robert Massie's biography ``Peter the Great'' is the best book about contemporary Russia, ``Dragonfly'' is the best account of the interplay of American and Russian cultures to appear in years.

The American public first tuned in to the shuttle-Mir missions in early 1997, when a raging fire and a subsequent in-space collision nearly claimed the lives of American astronauts Jerry Linenger, Michael Foale, and their Russian counterparts. But reading Burrough, you see that the shuttle-Mir program was a disaster, from its wobbly liftoff to its hellacious, terrifying finale.

The idea of sending NASA astronauts to the rickety, 12-year-old Mir was thrown together by a White House aide one week before President Bush's June 1992 summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Bush was already trailing an insurgent Bill Clinton in the polls, and needed a centerpiece ``event'' -- any event -- to make the summit newsworthy. The proposed cooperation served many constituencies: The White House got its spacey photo-op. NASA, unsuccessfully trying to flog its International Space Station, got a reason to live. And the Russians -- canny traders! -- got $400 million. The program likewise advanced the American policy goal of keeping Russian missile scientists employed, and out of the clutches of Saddam Hussein & Co.

Even though NASA boss Daniel Goldin hungered for the deal, the Mir program was a stepchild inside his bureaucracy. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, contempt for the Russian space effort ran deep and wide. While no one questioned the aptitude and bravery of the Russian cosmonauts, which proved to be considerable, frontline NASA personnel suspected the Russians were throwing outmoded, jury-rigged technology up into space. And they turned out to be right.

The culture clash between the Russians and Americans erupted almost immediately after NASA's traditionally pampered astronauts landed in Star City, the Russian training facility outside of Moscow. The Soviet Union had collapsed just a year before, and the appurtenances of modern civilization were in short supply. To supplant the unreliable phone system, the astronauts had one portable Inmarsat phone, normally reserved for ships at sea, to communicate with their families. When NASA finally installed its own phones in Star City, it made the astronauts pay for their personal calls.

Space exploration a la Russe proved to be quite an eye-opener. Linenger, the fourth American to fly on Mir, must have been surprised to hear his commander, Vasily Tsibliyev, discussing prospects for the mission with a famous Russian psychic -- from outer space! It fell to Linenger, a doctor, to read some blood ``data'' transmitted from Star City that falsely revealed the astronauts to be mortally ill. And it was Linenger who once flew into a basketball-sized glob of ethylene glycol coolant hovering in the middle of the space station. (Mir leaked coolant constantly, and had standing puddles of condensed water in several nooks and crannies. One Russian space boss estimated that the cosmonauts spent 75 percent of their waking hours repairing the station.)

Likewise Linenger was surprised to find a broken hatch secured with a do-it-yourself C-clamp, and it was his misfortune to witness the raging Mir fire, an event his Russian colleagues tried to cover up. Linenger criticized the safety conditions on board Mir, and was ostracized by Russians and Americans alike, who desperately wanted the show to go on.

This book was written in a hurry -- some of the interviews were conducted earlier this year -- but it doesn't read that way. Burrough investigates and celebrates the diverse personalities of the astronauts, many of whom revel in the anonymity of their androgynous space garb. Bonnie Dunbar is difficult; Norman Thagard is crotchety; Shannon Lucid goes along, gets along, and is one of the few Americans who actually enjoys the Mir. Burrough, co-author with John Helyar of the clunky bestseller ``Barbarians at the Gate,'' writes like a dream, and has the sweet eye for detail. Can there really be a NASA staffer named Stella Luna? Would he dare make that up?

Does the book have any shortcomings? I had a problem with the last few pages. Burrough ends the book with a roseate, hands-across-the-ocean paean to the virtues of US-Russian cooperation. But his hard work of reporting and writing belies this brief, Pollyannish conclusion. We are back in the joint-venture business with the Russian space program, assembling NASA's latest, dubious raison d'etre, the $60 billion International Space Station. That makes Burrough's book especially topical as American lives are once again risked in an overpriced and poorly conceived joint space program. This book -- the best of its kind in the past five years -- deserves a larger audience than it has received so far.