Scan barcode
allynfolksjr's review
4.0
Burrough's book is a very workable (and rare) overview of the Shuttle-Mir program that allowed the Americans and Russians start exploring how they can work together in order to make the ISS a reality. The nexus of this project was Mir, an aging Soviet-era space station. This book explores daily live aboard the station, frustrations of Americans training at Star City, the cash-strapped Russian space program, and the personalities of the astronauts and support staff who struggled to make this all work. It's a revealing and insightful book on how the Soviet Salyut programme must have operated and how the Russians approach spaceflight in a very different manner than the Americans.
There are a few quibbles about Dragonfly: the first quarter of the book quickly cycles through introducing a lot of personalities in the program without fully tying them together, and other than a few paragraph tour of Mir, there's no real exploration into how all the modules and systems worked. A larger introduction to the station in one concise place would have been helpful to more fully understand (and trace) the action aboard the station.
There are a few quibbles about Dragonfly: the first quarter of the book quickly cycles through introducing a lot of personalities in the program without fully tying them together, and other than a few paragraph tour of Mir, there's no real exploration into how all the modules and systems worked. A larger introduction to the station in one concise place would have been helpful to more fully understand (and trace) the action aboard the station.
More...