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2016–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- There's a roughly contemporary book "Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough that I recall being somewhat controversial when it came out but also very carefully reported. I do recommend it still.
- If you like this, you should definitely read "Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir" by Bryan Burrough. It's an amazing portrait of the disintegrating immediately-ex-Soviet space program, and the disintegrating space station they were trying to keep flying.
This article mentions other countries buying seats on Mir. The book explains how this was a deliberate international effort to keep the Russian space program alive with infusions of hard cash. This was to avoid huge numbers of scientists with, effectively, high-level missile experience dispersing across the world in desperate need of money (rockets==missiles; that was the point of the whole original space race).
It's an eye-opening look at an astonishing time, and it culminates in heart-stopping descriptions of the various in-flight accidents, including the mid-space collision with a supply craft that knocked a hole in the station and nearly killed everyone aboard.
If you prefer video, the author gave an extended interview about it when it was released: https://www.c-span.org/video/?115419-1/dragonfly-nasa-crisis...
- Never heard of it before. Who exactly calls it "one of the best" besides you?
Here is a review from the National Space Society:
"As the title suggests, the book is extremely negative in tone and hostile to the entire Soviet space effort, from top to bottom. The book portrays the Soviets as bumblers and fools, veering from catastrophe to disaster. Soviet space successes (including the first manned spaceflight, the first flight of a female Cosmonaut, and other missions) are treated as lucky breaks or close calls, and nothing more. While some may find this fun or amusing, it has little basis in reality. The Soviet space program was a monumental undertaking that, like the U.S. space program, demanded the service of the nation’s top engineers, manufacturers, pilots, etc. Many books, including Colin Burgess’s outstanding Soviets in Space, James Harford’s Korolev, William Burrough’s This New Ocean, and other works all portray the Soviet effort in a much more realistic manner and demonstrate what a massive and serious effort it was. Even Bryan Burrough’s Dragonfly, which is highly critical of the Russians and details more than a few life-threatening misadventures aboard the Mir Space Station, does not portray the Russians as clods the way that Strausbaugh does. ...
The problem is that one could just as easily write a similar book, with a similar tone, about the U.S. space program. The loss of the Mercury capsule during Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 flight, the Apollo 1 fire that claimed the lives of three U.S. astronauts, Gene Cernan and Dick Gordon’s deeply troubled spacewalks on Gemini 9A and Gemini 11, respectively, as well as the Challenger and Columbia disasters could be described in the same manner and it would be just as unfair and disingenuous."
- > My question is did NASA learn from this and improved the scheduling for future missions? Seems they have with ISS unless I’m wrong?
They have a mixed record. If you read Bryan Burrough's Dragonfly, which includes some first-hand accounts, you can see that the NASA astronauts who visited Mir had varied results in this regard but the overall pattern was that of a lax, highly understaffed effort towards scheduling and training on those missions.
> Seems they have with ISS unless I’m wrong?
That program has a better reputation for sure. I'd love book recommendations if anyone has anything.
- Thanks. I haven't seen this, I did read about the incident in Brian Burrough's Dragonfly.
- Just started reading Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir [http://www.amazon.com/Dragonfly-NASA-And-Crisis-Aboard/dp/08...]. It seems to be an interesting story about problems that plagued NASA and Russia in the 90s.
