H063--FRONT Leaving Earth

by Robert Zimmerman Joseph Henry Press Washington, D.C. Joseph Henry Press • 500 Fifth Street, N.W. • Washington, D.C. 20001 The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public. Joseph Henry was one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in early American science. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences or its affiliated institutions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zimmerman, Robert, 1953- Leaving earth : space stations, rival superpowers, and the quest for interplanetary travel / by Robert Zimmerman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-309-08548-9 (Hardcover) 1. Astronautics—History. 2. Outer space—Exploration—History. 3. Astronautics—Political aspects—History. I. Title. TL788.5.Z55 2003 2003007637 Cover: First two modules of the International Space Station. Photo by NASA/ Science Photo Library. Copyright 2003 by Robert Zimmerman. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. To my wife Diane, who knows how to help me write. Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1. Skyscrapers in the Sky 1 2. Salyut: “I Wanted Him to Come Home.” 19 3. Skylab: A Glorious Forgotten Triumph 48 4. The Early Salyuts: “The Prize of All People” 81 5. Salyut 6: The End of Isolation 114 6. Salyut 7: Phoenix in Space 163 7. Freedom: “You’ve Got to Put on Your Management Hat . .” 207 8. Mir: A Year in Space 227 9. Mir: The Road to Capitalism 270 10. Mir: The Joys of Freedom 303 vii viii CONTENTS 11. Mir: Almost Touching 326 12. Mir: Culture Shock 375 13. Mir: Spin City 416 14. International Space Station: Ships Passing in the Night 446 Bibliography 467 Notes 483 Index 509 List of Illustrations 1. Salyut with approaching Soyuz, 28 2. Skylab with docked Apollo spacecraft and Salyut for scale, 52 3. Salyut 3, 87 4. Salyut 4 with approaching Soyuz, 93 5. Salyut 6, 115 6. Salyut 7 with transport-support module, 166 7. Mir core module, 230 8. Mir core with Kvant, 240 9. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, 274 10. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, 284 11. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, with Sofora, Strela, and docked Soyuz-TM and Progress-M, 312 12. Mir, Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, with docked Soyuz-TM, 385 13. Mir complete, with Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, Priroda, with docked Soyuz-TM and Progress-M, 407 14. International Space Station, as of December 2002, 450 Acknowledgments No book can be written without the help and support of others. I must give special thanks to my interpreter, Andrew Vodostoy, and to all those who made my trip to Moscow possible, including Nina Doudouchava and her two children, Alice and Philip, Nicholai Mugue, Anatoli Artsebarski, Alexander Cherniavsky, and Galina Nechitailo. I must also thank the many cosmonauts, engi- neers, and scientists who gave me so much of their time in inter- views when I met them in Russia. Authors Michael Cassutt and James Harford as well as Soviet space historians Asif Saddiqi, Bert Vis, and Charles Vic also deserve my gratitude for their advice about working in Moscow. Thanks must also go to David Harland and Michael Cassutt for reviewing my manuscript, Glen Swanson for helping me obtain Valeri Ryumin’s diary, David S. Hamilton at Boeing for creating the International Space Station graphic, and Janet Ormes and the librarians at the Goddard Space Flight Center as well as Jane Odom, Colin Fries, and John Hargenrader and everyone else at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C., for pro- viding me more information than I imagined existed. I also thank my editor, Jeff Robbins, for having faith in my writing talent, as well as all the talented people at the Joseph Henry Press for making my writing shine. This book would not exist without their effort. Finally, I must recognize and praise the men and women, Rus- sian and American, who risked their lives to fly into space and extend the range of human experience. It was their courage and dedication that actually wrote this history. ix Preface Societies change. Though humans have difficulty perceiving this fact during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The story of the first space stations and the men and women who built and flew them is in most ways a story of the evolution of the Russian people. When they began their journey to the stars in 1957, they were an isolated, xenophobic, authoritarian culture ruled by an oppressive elite who believed that they had the right to dictate how everyone else should live their lives. Forty years later, that same nation has become one of the world’s newest democracies. Its borders are open, its people free, and its economy booming. In the years between, driven by an inescapable, generations-old insecurity, Russia went out into space to prove itself to the world, and ended up taking the first real, long-term steps toward the colo- nization of the solar system. Cosmonauts, using equipment built by people only one generation removed from illiteracy, hung by their fingernails on the edge of space and learned how to make the first real interplanetary journeys. Sometimes men died. Sometimes they rose above their roots and did glorious and brave things. In the process, and most ironically, the space program that the commu- nists supported and funded in their futile effort to reshape human nature helped wean Russia away from communism and dictatorship and toward freedom and capitalism. xi xii PREFACE Leaving Earth is my attempt to tell that story. Nor is this book solely about how Russia changed in the late twentieth century. For Americans, this story carries its own lessons, lessons that some might find hard to take. For at the same time the Russians were pulling themselves out of tyranny as they lifted their eyes to the stars, the United States evolved from an innovative, free society to a culture that today seems bogged down with bureaucracy, centralization, and too much self-centeredness. In the early 1970s, the United States had the tools, the abili- ties, the vision, the freedom, and the will to go to the stars. We had already explored the moon. Our rockets were the most powerful ever built. And we had launched the first successful space station, with capabilities so sophisticated that the Soviets took almost three decades of effort to finally match it. With only a little extra labor, that station could have been turned into a space vessel able to carry humans anywhere in the Solar System. The road was open before us, ours for the taking. And then the will faded. For the next 30 years, the trail-blazing was taken up by others, as Americans chose to do less risky and possibly less noble tasks. More importantly, just as the bold Soviet space program helped teach the Russians to live openly and free, the top-heavy and timid American space program of the late twentieth century helped teach Americans to depend, not on freedom and decentralization, but on a centralized Soviet-style bureaucracy—to the detriment of American culture and its desire to con- quer the stars. That these facts might reflect badly on my own country sad- dens me beyond words. I was born into a nation of free-spirited individuals, where all Americans believed they were pioneers, able to forge new paths and build new communities wherever they went. Or, as stated in 1978 by one much-maligned but principled politician, born of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, We are the “can-do” people. We crossed the oceans; we climbed the mountains, forded the rivers, traveled the prairies to build on this continent a monument to human freedom. We came from many lands with different tongues united in our belief in God and our thirst for freedom. We said governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We said the people are sovereign.1 Whether this describes the American nation today I do not know. If one were to use as a guide our accomplishments in space since Barry Goldwater said these words, one would not feel encouraged. Preface xiii Yet, the true test of a free and great people is whether they have the stomach to face difficult truths, and do something about it. It is what the American public did in the 1860s, when it freed the slaves. It is what that same society did in the 1950s, when it ended racial discrimination. And it is what the Russian people did in 1991, when they rejected a communist dictatorship and became free. I sincerely hope that future Americans will be as courageous, performing acts as noble. Above us, the stars still gleam, beckoning us. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” said the poet Rob- ert Browning. Who shall grab for that heaven? Who will have the courage, boldness, and audacity to reach for the stars, and bring them down to us all? For the last 40 years far-sighted dreamers in both the United States and Russia struggled to assemble the first interplanetary spaceships. For many political reasons, they called them space stations, and pretended that their sole function was to orbit the earth and perform scientific research in space.

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