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Title: Dragonfly : An Epic Adventure of Survival in Outer Space by Bryan Burrough ISBN: 0-06-093269-4 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.35 (46 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Drama, action, intrigue...
Comment: It is said that truth is better than the best fiction. Bryan Burrough's "Dragonfly" proves that it's true. A blow-by-blow account of the Shuttle/Mir missions, "Dragonfly" roars along like a Tom Clancy thriller. We meet bumbling politicians, Machiavellian NASA administrators, egotistic astronauts, martyred cosmonauts, and clueless ground-support crews, American and Russian alike. Parenthetically, it's a wonderful comparison of the cultures of these space superpowers, and why International Space Station missions may have some built-in psychological risks.
(Aside: considering the top-heavy committment and involvement of the United States, the "international" space station is about as "international" as an International House of Pancakes.)
A must-read for anyone interested in space exploration. Especially a must-read for anyone unfortunate enough to have paid money for astronaut Jerry Linenger's book, "Off the Earth -- Surviving five perilous months aboard Mir." The reader may judge for himself the "peril" involved, especially in light of the dangers faced by Linenger's successor on Mir, astronaut Michael Foale.
If anything, Burrough is perhaps too balanced and fair-minded in his prose. One suspects he had reams of material he couldn't use, as it would make the book more of a "kiss-and-tell" than it actually is. Nevertheless, some of the finest reporting about NASA (and public policy as a whole) in years.
Rating: 4
Summary: A piece of space history unlike any other before it
Comment: Brian Burrough's DRAGONFLY covers the entire "Phase One" program to put NASA astronauts aboard the Russian space station Mir in the mid 1990s. The project was fraught with problems and near-disasters, and it is an example of how not to conduct an international space partnership, or any other project, for that matter.
The book is well researched, and Burrough is not afraid to delve into the dark waters of NASA's bureaucracy to round out the story. He dug deep to interview many of the significant figures of the book, including the likes of astronaut Jerry Linenger, Phase One director Frank Culbertson, NASA administrator Dan Goldin, and NASA's Johnson Space Center director George Abbey. Almost no one comes off unsoiled, and yet the author treats each subject fairly. Burrough makes extensive use of American and Russian flight transcripts, and he takes care to document the stressful lives of Russian cosmonauts, who are severely overworked and underappreciated. The author's narrative and reconstructed dialogue are well written, and he always allows the story and the people, rather than commentaries, to propel the book. I think Burrough achieves a good balance in presenting the material, which must have been difficult given the myriad personalities and politics involved.
However, I was disappointed in the choppy layout of DRAGONFLY's major sections. Burrough takes a hundred pages to outline the beginnings of Phase One and its troubles from 1992 to 1997 ... the problem is, this critical background is actually Part Two, and it appears in the middle of the book, which interrupts the tumultuous events of 1997. By that point, this section does the reader little good, because we are already up to our ears in Phase One's trials and tribulations. As I was reading, I couldn't help but ask myself repeatedly, "Why am I reading this now?" Phase One's dysfunctional operation in Russia and its harried, undersupported astronauts Shannon Lucid, Bonnie Dunbar and Norm Thagard provide an ominous prologue to later events. But Burrough's failure to present these stories at the book's outset only serves to downplay their significance while disrupting the natural line of the story, and that's a shame.
Fortunately, that's the only significant criticism this book deserves from an outsider. DRAGONFLY is a landmark space history book by an author who has certainly done his legwork. Future space projects can learn a lot from Phase One's missteps, and DRAGONFLY provides a full accounting of those events. This illuminates the space business like no other account before it, and I think space history is better off because of it.
(My last comment goes to the publishers at Harper Perennial: Whoever decided to display a 1965-era photo of a Gemini spacewalker on the cover of this trade paperback set in the late 1990s ought to be fired for incompetence. I might as well write a book about the Persian Gulf War and put Audie Murphy on the cover.)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of my favorite space books!
Comment: This is a great book, very entertaining! You'll feel like you are really there, floating around in the space station.The book goes into a lot of behind-the-scenes personality clashes between astronauts/cosmonauts. Tells the story of the Mir and International space stations.
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Title: Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry M. Linenger ISBN: 007137230X Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books Pub. Date: 12 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh ISBN: 081541028X Publisher: Cooper Square Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz ISBN: 0425179877 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 08 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at Nasa by Diane Vaughan ISBN: 0226851761 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 1997 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance by James Oberg ISBN: 0071407960 Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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