Dragonfly, NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir

   In Dragonfly, Bryan Burrough tells for the first time the incredible true story of how a joint Russian-American crew narrowly survived almost every trauma an astronaut could imagine; fire, power blackouts, chemical leaks, docking failures, nail biting spacewalks, constant mechanical breakdowns, all climaxing in a dramatic midspace collision that left everyone onboard scrambling for their lives. Burrough portrays an American space program in which many astronauts refuse to raise safety concerns for fear they will be frozen out of future missions. It offers an unprecedented look inside the rattletrap Russian space program where the desperate thirst for hard currency leads to safety shortcuts and exhausted puppetlike cosmonauts endure truley inhuman pressures from their unfeeling, all powerful masters on the ground.

  On February 12, 1997, two Russian cosmonauts joined an American astronaut onboard the only permanent manned outpost in space, the dilapidated, eleven year old Mir space station. It was to be a routine mission, the fourth of seven trips to Mir that NASA astronauts would take as "dress rehearsals" for the two countries' parnership in a new International Space Station they were building back on Earth. But there had been bad omens: a Moscow psychic who predicted a mysterious disaster; a Russian doctor who warned that the crew was psychologically incompatible. Withn two weeks the omens were borne out, as thethree men were suddenly forced to fight the worst fire in space history.

   This was only the beginning of what would become the most dangerous mission in the thirty-six year history of manned space travel - an epic, six month misadventure that would climax in the most harrowing accident man has faced in space since Apollo 13.

   This is a classic story of triumph over adversity, destined to be one of the most enduring and widely celebrated adventure stories of our time. (...from inside cover)