Star-Crossed Orbits: Inside the US鈥揜ussian Space Alliance
by James Oberg, McGraw-Hill, 拢20.99/$27.95, ISBN 0071374256
IN the tragicomic final years of the Russian space station Mir, astronauts
and cosmonauts aboard the leaky vessel pluckily survived fires, collisions and
assorted other mishaps. Such near-disasters, former NASA engineer James Oberg
reveals, were more dangerous and more frequent than anyone let on at the
time.
From Apollo-Soyuz through Mir and on to the international space station,
cooperation between the Americans and the Russians has been, in Oberg鈥檚
prodigiously detailed telling, an on-again, off-again saga of misunderstandings
and squabbles punctuated by occasional successes. The struggling Soviet, then
Russian, space programme absorbed NASA鈥檚 bountiful dollars, but repeatedly
failed to deliver. The American response was to send more money, pretending that
all was well rather than give up on the golden dream of collaboration.
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A little simplistically, Oberg sees almost all problems as arising from
Russian duplicity compounded by NASA鈥檚 wilful self-delusion. His heroes are the
hard-working astronauts and engineers, his villains a cast of politicians and
administrators. Oberg is rather too pleased with his role as the unsparing
truth-teller picking his way through a minefield of lies and deception, but his
intimate knowledge of both the Russian and the American space programmes and his
boundless admiration for the men and women who go into space make this a
forceful, angry, and revealing book.