Table Of Contentby
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 every-
one 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 with-
out 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 dictator-
ship 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 les-
sons, 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 twen-
tieth century helped teach Americans to depend, not on freedom
and decentralization, but on a centralized Soviet-style bureau-
cracy—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 sta-
tions, and pretended that their sole function was to orbit the earth
and perform scientific research in space.
Their builders, however, knew better. Someday humans will
put engines on these space stations, and instead of keeping station
around the earth, humans will launch them out into interplanetary
space, leaving Earth behind to voyage to other worlds and make
possible the colonization of the planets.
When that great leap into the unknown finally occurs, what
kind of human society will those explorers build, out there amid
the stars? Will it be a free and happy place, “a monument to human
freedom”? Or will it be something else, something of which few
would be proud? The nation that reaches for the stars will be the
one to make that determination.
“What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare. The events in
space in the past 40 years have sent the human race down a certain
path. It is my hope that by telling that story, I help future genera-
tions travel that road more wisely.
As far as the eye could reach, spread vast expanses of Russia,
brown and flat and with hardly a sign of human habitation. Here
and there sharp rectilineal patches of ploughed land revealed an
occasional state farm. For a long way the mighty Volga gleamed in
curves and stretches as it flowed between its wide, dark margins
of marsh. Sometimes a road, straight as a ruler, ran from one wide
horizon to the other.2
—Winston Churchill, as he flew into the Soviet Union for the first
time during World War II.
Peter [the Great] probably also experienced what many succeed-
ing generations of his countrymen experienced when returning
home from abroad: a feeling of disappointment, irritation, even
resentment, at one’s own nation, whose backwardness smacks one
in the face.3
—Russian historian Aleksandr B. Kamenskii, describing Peter the
Great’s first trip to England.
In Russia, like nowhere else, [they] are masters at discerning weak-
nesses—the ridiculous—and shortcomings in a foreigner. One may
rest assured that they will miss nothing, because, naturally, no
Russian deep in his heart likes any foreigner.4
—Catherine the Great
I am not unduly disturbed about our respective responses or lack
of responses from Moscow. I have decided they do not use speech
for the same purposes as we do.5
—Franklin Roosevelt, October 28, 1942, in a letter to Winston
Churchill.
We have to provide the crew with virtually everything for the en-
tire duration of their absence from the earth—air to breathe, food
and drinking water, repair tools, spare parts, heatable and pressur-
ized quarters for the stay on the cold Martian plains, surface ve-
hicles and fuel for them, down to such prosaic items as a washing
machine and a pencil sharpener.6
—Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun, 1956
I’ve been waiting all my life for this day!7
—Sergei Korolev, the day that Sputnik was launched.
