SPINNING like a metal dragonfly high above Earth, the Russian space station
Mir is still in orbit. And after reading Bryan Burrough’s account of the myriad
disasters that befell it, you can only marvel at the luck that has kept it
there.

By 1997, months of accidents and equipment failures had brought Mir to the
edge of disaster.

A fire broke out in an oxygen generator. Corroded pipes in the cooling system
pipes leaked ethylene glycol into the craft. With the cooling system not
working, temperature and humidity raged out of control. The crew had to switch
off the carbon dioxide removal system to repair their pipes, further polluting
the atmosphere. Worse, they had to give up the treadmill exercise vital for
health under zero gravity.

Unremitting workloads and repair schedules for the cosmonauts set by the
Russian mission control (TsUP) demoralised and exhausted the crew. For months,
NASA’s space shuttle ferried four NASA astronauts to and from the ageing Mir,
the first steps in a joint programme to build the International Space Station.
The US was paying $400 million to the Russians to participate in Mir. And
the survival of the Russian space programme depended on these dollars.

But the Russian crew and the fourth NASA astronaut, Jerry Lininger proved a
bad mix, compromising working relationships on board. The tension eased when
Michael Foale relieved Lininger.

Disaster struck in June 1997 when TsUP tested the manual docking of a
Progress supply spacecraft. A TV camera on Progress transmitted images of Mir to
the pilot, who then fired the thruster rockets to guide the craft into the
docking port. Radar on Progress provided range and velocity data via a telemetry
link. In an earlier near-disastrous test of this procedure, the TV link had
failed, possibly due to interference from the radar. So the TsUP wanted a
docking without the telemetry link: the commander and crew were to estimate
range and speed of approach visually. It went horribly wrong.

Unseen behind Mir’s solar arrays, Progress approached at high speed. The
commander responded too late. Progress crashed into the Spektr module of Mir,
puncturing its skin and causing rapid decompression. The astronauts rushed to
seal off the damaged module. But with the solar arrays damaged, Mir’s batteries
quickly drained, the stabilisation system shut down causing the solar arrays to
veer away from the Sun, and all life support systems crashed as power failed
completely.

Astronauts and mission controllers fought to save the station, and succeeded.
How had things reached such a pass? Burrough reckons that the answer lies in the
clash between two space-going cultures. The differing approach to human space
flight at NASA and in Russia had come into conflict for the first time on these
Mir missions.

Using transcripts of communications between the astronauts and their ground
controllers and interviews with many Russian and American astronauts, ground
controllers, managers and families, Burrough narrates the events leading up to
the collision and after. This part of Dragonfly is enthralling and
convincing, although Burrough makes a few errors of technical detail in Mir’s
hardware.

A less satisfactory aspect, however, is his treatment of issues such as
astronaut safety, the psychological behaviour under stress of the MIR astronauts
(both Russian and American), and the political background in NASA to the Mir
missions. In scene-setting chapters (over 80 pages long), his potted
personal histories and psychological profiles of the astronauts are tedious. He
tries to explain NASA’s low level of involvement in safety decisions on Mir by
speculating that NASA accepted lower standards than those for shuttle flights
post-Challenger, but fails to convince.

And he suggests that NASA continued to support Mir missions after the docking
crash only because it was concerned that Russia would pull out of the
International Space Station.

All these factors had a bearing on the overall picture of the Mir programme.
But Burrough’s selective and anecdotal coverage devalue the impact of
Dragonfly. It might best serve as a film script for a sequel to Apollo 13.
Perhaps that is what he has in mind.

THE subtitle of this book “How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat
America to the Moon” is slightly misleading. James Harford is not writing solely
about the race between the US and the Soviet Union to send a man to the Moon.
His erudite and meticulously researched charting of the life and times of Sergei
Pavlovich Korolev, the anonymous chief designer of the Soviet space programme,
provides unique insights into the personalities, organisation, technical and
scientific development, and successes and failures of the Soviet space and
missile programme. While he puts the space race within the much wider context of
Soviet political and military strategies during the Cold War, he still manages
to tell the compelling life story of an individual whose influence on some of
the most significant scientific events of this century has not yet been properly
recognised.

Before 1957, little was known about Soviet space technology and capability
outside the Soviet Union. By the time Yuri Gagarin became Earth’s first
cosmonaut in 1961, completing his single orbit flight in Vostok 1, the Soviet
lead in space and rocket technology was perceived by the West as a major
ideological and military threat. The missile build-up and the Apollo Moon
programme were a direct response by the US to these “threats”.

Not surprisingly, then, the identity of Korolev, and his key role in the
development of the Soviet space and missile programmes, was a well-kept secret
until after his death. Harford has taken advantage of glasnost to study
previously unreleased documents, visit formerly restricted industrial complexes
and launch sites, and interview people who knew Korolev—from engineers,
managers and cosmonauts, to his close colleagues and family. The result is a
clear record of Korolev’s leading role in the Soviet space and missile
programmes.

The early chapters of Korolev skip through his childhood in the
Ukraine, where he first became inspired by aviation, and his early days in
Moscow, where he came under the influence and guidance of Andrey Tupolev of
aircraft design fame. A picture emerges of an energetic, highly motivated young
engineer.

While working in an aircraft design bureau, he joined a hobby group
experimenting with rocket propulsion. Their first successful launch was in 1933
seven years after Robert Goddard’s in the US.

Korolev’s experiments led him and other contemporaries into full-time
research in rocket technology during the 1930s. Although the work had obvious
military connections, writings from this group make frequent reference to the
possibilities of rocket propulsion for space travel.

Chapter 4 gives a chilling insight into the risks and privations suffered by
the scientific community during Stalin’s reign of terror. Korolev, denounced by
colleagues to the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB), was arrested, beaten up and
sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian gulag. In 1939, he won a partial remission,
enabling him to join his old mentor Tupolev. Tupolev had been arrested in 1937
and was in a Soviet penal institution called a sharaga, a prison
factory for scientists and intellectuals whose inmates worked on state-directed
projects. Korolev was later moved to another in Kazan where he led design
projects to build jet engines and rocket thrusters.

Rehabilitation for Korolev came when he was released from Kazan and sent to
Germany to gather information on the V-2 rocket, collecting hardware and German
expertise to re-establish Soviet rocket and missile technology.

After the hairy days of the war, Korolev spent much of the 1950s devising
Russian alternatives to the V-2. He set up a powerful Soviet rocket production
industry. Trials produced the R-7 multi-stage missile with a range of 6400
kilometres, providing the Soviet Union with an intercontinental missile capable
of reaching the US. His rocket and missile programme had acquired great
strategic importance.

The programme was controlled at a very high level in Soviet government, the
top-secret Committee Number 2. In September 1953, Korolev proposed the
development of an artificial satellite to this committee arguing the flight of
Sputnik 1 would serve as a powerful public demonstration of the Soviet Union’s
ICBM capability. And so it proved.

A year later, he presented even more ambitious plans—this time for a
“2-3 tonne scientific satellite”, a “recoverable satellite”, “a satellite with a
long orbital stay for 1-2 people”, and “an orbital station with regular Earth
ferry communication”. Korolev brought all four to fulfilment. Sputnik 3 flew in
1958; the first spy satellite Zenit followed in 1962; the cosmonauts in Vostok
in 1963 and Voskhod in 1964 achieved long duration records and the first space
station, Salyut, was flown in 1971.

The Soviet lunar programme depended heavily on the high technical performance
of Korolev’s rocket systems and the industrial infrastructure that he built up,
as well as his political influence and his drive and determination. All went
well at first. Plans to explore the Moon, eventually using astronauts, were
presented in 1957. Successful fly-by, landing and lunar orbital flights were all
accomplished in quick succession during 1959.

It was clear that these missions were achieved at the limits of the
technology available with the R-7 launcher system. Sending people to the Moon
required much more powerful launchers and big improvements to electronics and
guidance systems. But the Soviets had ignored the need for miniaturised,
low-power, high-reliability electronic systems. When the Moon race became
official policy under President Kennedy in 1961, the Soviet military-industrial
complex failed to keep up.

Korolev concentrated his resources on the N-1 rocket system, using a cluster
of 30 R-7 type engines. An alternative from the military sector called UR-500K
used storable propellants emerged as a competitor. Bureaucratic intervention and
personality clashes led to indecision and both projects were supported, but at
inadequate levels. The Soviet heavy-lift launchers failed to keep up with NASA’s
Saturn and Apollo programmes. Neil Armstrong got to the Moon first.

Korolev died suddenly in 1966, leaving a faltering Moon programme. His N-1
launcher failed its test firings and was cancelled in 1976. The UR-500K survived
to become the Proton rocket, now used for Russian and US satellite launches.
Karolev’s legacy is the town named for him and the RCS Energia industrial
complex that built the Mir space station and is now partner with NASA in the
production of the International Space Station.

This is a fascinating book, packed with technical and historical detail for
the space expert and enthusiast alike. Any Western scientist who has worked on
Russian missions will recognise the Korolev way of working described so
perceptively.

Harford not only records the history of Korolev the man and his works, but
also an unprecedented insight into what it was like to live and work in a great
technological enterprise in the Soviet Union when the superpower was at the
height of its political and military strength. Great stuff.

The first 10 definitions concisely describe various nonscientific meanings
of ‘charge’ derived from the writings of the great, such as ‘care; trust;
custody’ and ‘precept; mandate; command’. But the last definition grabbed
my attention: ‘(In heraldry) The charge is that which is borne upon the
���DZ��dzܰ�.’

I was transfixed: charge and colour are two properties of quarks. Could
this be another prescient example of time-warp morphic resonance: the Nostradamus
effect so beloved of New �Ӱ�ԭ�� readers? Following the rules of morphic
analysis, I looked at the last entry at the bottom of the same column. My
suspicions were confirmed. The last word was ‘charm – something of power
to gain the affections’. Charm: yet another property of the flavoursome
quark, together with an elegant description of nuclear power.

The final confirmation was the page number: 98. Morphic predictions
inevitably involve an invertable number, linked as they are to 666, the
number of the Beast. The probability of this occurring by chance is incalculable,
but I am sure readers will be able to draw their own conclusions on this.
Perhaps quark researchers might find further quarky insights on pages 98
or 86? What interesting insights into your own field could be hiding in
this book?

Johnson can certainly give scientific guidance to modern researchers
in other ways. For example, Ian Gordon referred to the sticky problem for
researchers choosing a spelling for synthesise/-ize (Forum, 11 May 1991).
Although Johnson did not bother to define ‘synthesise/-ize’, his definitions
of synthesis and synthetick give cross references to analysis and analytick,
where the verb ‘to analyze’ is defined as ‘to resolve a compound into its
first principles’. Researchers who believe in the ascendancy of synthesize
and analyze are therefore quite right, although logic dictates that they
must also insist on the corresponding spellings of the words ‘synthetick’
and ‘analytick’.

It is also a delight to scan through the dictionary for its definitions
which, sifted in large part from the writings of the great ‘authorities’
and for the rest furnished by Johnson himself, show an economy and elegance
lacking in many modern works. Reflect on this excerpt from his preface:
‘If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation
of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of
policy, war and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction
from Spencer and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare,
few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which
they might be expressed.’

Do we have a modern equivalent for Francis Bacon, or is the breadth
of scientific knowledge and the pace of progress too great for one man to
handle? To determine the modern or future successor to Bacon maybe morphic
name analysis (MNA) could help? MNA of course relies on resonant harmonies
in the names of great artists and scientists.

As a guide to the MNA technique, I am reminded of a morphic exchange
of views a while back in these pages on predicting the next great physicist,
based on the historic ‘unitary’ (avoirdupois) names new-ton and one-stone
(Einstein). However, this translation of Einstein was improper: a stein
is not only a stone (piece of rock), but also a beer mug, that is, a non-avoirdupois
measure of volume. Names involving weight and volume have already been dealt
with so, according to MNA, the name of the next great physicist will include
a measure of time, with some suitable prefix. If your name is Bonjour, Happyhour,
or the Japanese equivalent, get studying.

My inexperience of MNA leaves me unable to say who should be Bacon’s
successor, nor who should replace Raleigh, Hooker, Spencer, the Bible, Sidney
and Shakespeare. Names having connections with meat, bicycles, persuasive
ladies and stores look promising. However, Sidney, Shakespeare and particularly
the Bible look more tricky.

Morphic digressions apart, Johnson’s spelling and definitions for the
names of scientifick professions are worthy of attention. The ‘chymist’
will delight in his definition as ‘a professor of chymistry, a philosopher
by fire’, although perhaps vexed at playing second fiddle to the ‘alchymist’
practising ‘the more sublime chymistry, which proposes the transmutation
of metals’. But at least there is no confusion of the ‘pharmacopolist’,
‘an apothecary, one who sells medicine’, with the ‘chymist’.

The naturalist appears, as ‘a student in physiks or natural philosophy’,
while physiology is listed as ‘the doctrine of the constitution of the works
of nature’. The astronomer at least should be happy to be described as
‘one who studies the celestial motions, and the rules by which they are
governed’. The geologist too will be content with studying ‘the doctrine
of the earth’.

On the biological front, Johnson does not list bioanything, but is content
with defining botanist, ‘one skilled in plants’, together with the forgotten
zoographer, ‘one who describes the nature, properties, and forms of animals’,
as well as the cruel-sounding zootomist, ‘a dissector of the bodies of brute
���𲹲��ٲ�’.

The dictionary gives other charming scientific words that have fallen
out of use. Has nobody today a use for the delightful ‘to discandy’ (to
dissolve or to melt)? Perhaps we could revive ‘the circulatory – a chymical
vessel, wherein that which rises from the vessel on the fire, is collected
and cooled in another fixed upon it, and falls down again’, which sounds
like a type of reflux condenser.

His spelling may have been eccentric, but Johnson would certainly not
have relied like you on an electrical computer for help, indeed the very
idea would have been criminally insane. A computer was a ‘reckoner, accountant
or calculator’, and electricity was ‘a property in bodies, whereby, when
rubbed, they draw substances, emit flame, and may be fitted with such a
quantity of the electrical vapour, as, if discharged at once upon a human
body, would endanger life’. Computer science is thus obviously a murderous
branch of necromancy, namely ‘enchantment; conjuration’.

On the subject of data processing (‘data: allowed premises’; ‘processing:
methodical management of any thing’) Johnson has some appropriate definitions.
For example, anyone who has sweated trying to transfer data, might think
the description he gave to a tropical tribe as ‘those . . . who have no
shadow . . . inhabitants of the torrid zone’, provides a more apt definition
of ASCII than ‘American standard code for information interchange’.

All of which gets us back to Nostradamus. However, I prefer Johnson:
he seemed to have had a healthy respect for science, clarity and honesty.

Alan Wells is a chemical patent examiner for the European Patent Office,
The Hague.