Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir

Filed under: Book Reviews, Chris Mitchell, Science   

Chris Mitchell

Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made international headlines as it lurched from one near disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected into the ailing Russian space program, Mir continued to remain dangerously unstable. Bryan Burrough’s book is a behind-the-scenes account of what was happening both in space and on the ground.

Since 1992, NASA has sent its astronauts to train in Russia’s Star City in preparation for going aboard Mir. Burrough details the inevitable clash of cultures - while the Americans were used to rehearsing for every contingency on the Shuttle, the Russians adopted a improvisational approach, fuelled by the lack of funds for their space program. The cosmonauts were paid bonuses for the efficient running of the station, which led to American accusations of safety procedures being ignored in order to keep Mir operational.

Burrough focuses on two NASA astronauts sent to Mir, Jerry Linenger and the British-born Mike Foale, highlighting their very different attitudes towards the Russians. Linenger witnessed the outbreak of a fire and returned to Earth vocally condemning the space station as a deathtrap. Foale was on board when Mir’s hull was ruptured by a collision with the Progress supply vessel, giving the crew members less than seven minutes to seal off the module before losing all their oxygen. Instead of insisting on evacuation as safety procedure demanded, Foale helped cosmonauts Tsibliyev and Lazutkin block the breach.

In both cases, Burrough reveals that the response of mission control was hampered by NASA’s pitiful lack of knowledge about Mir and the unwillingness of some Russian technicians to share their expertise. Veteran astronaut John Blaha returned from Mir suffering from exhaustion and depression, blaming both on NASA’s lack of ground support.

Given the daily struggle of the undeniably brave crew members and the chaos in mission control, it’s difficult to read Dragonfly and remember that the story it tells is factually true rather than a science fiction thriller. However, Burrough doesn’t trivialise his subject - by narrating the events through a day by day approach, he reports the conversations of the astronauts and mission control verbatim, showing the depth of his research while keeping the unfolding tension of the story alive.

Worryingly, Burrough indicates that these communication problems look set to continue on Mir’s replacement, the International Space Station. But Mir itself will not be anyone’s home again - the station will be programmed to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up later this year, plummeting into the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles off New Zealand.

Posted on February 1st, 1999.

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