Off the Planet: My Five Months Abroad the Space Station Mir

U.S. astronaut Linenger lived on the rickety Russian space station for five months in 1997, enduring a near-fatal fire, malicious rumors, Moscow micromanagement and a near collision with an unmanned, ""worthless, garbage-filled cargo-ship"" called Progress. Yet Linenger's detailed and informal memoir sounds less frustrated than honestly optimistic. The author gives readers a long run-up to his five months in orbit, describing his time at the Naval Academy, his Space Shuttle experience and his life in Russia's rundown cosmonaut complex, Star City. His experiences aboard the Space Shuttle that brings him to the Mir station give Linenger an opportunity to depict the humorous side of life in orbit: he tells us, for example, how a fellow astronaut called, from space, the radio program Car Talk, and he explains how he washed and shaved (using a ""specially formulated NASA shaving cream called `Astro Edge' "") while off-planet. When he arrives at Mir, the space station looks like ""six school buses all hooked together""; inside, it's startlingly cluttered. The station's increasingly hazardous state confirms that the Shuttle-Mir collaborations existed less for the sake of science than for the sake of the Russian economy. Linenger's narrative could have used some editing, as when his descriptions give way to comments such as ""I... really enjoy squeezing as many projects into my life as possible."" Still, his frank, personable prose shows readers what it's like to be an astronaut--or at least to be this particular astronaut, trying, along with his Russian companions, to live and work with good humor on an 11-year-old, half-broken, famously flammable space station as its air fills with antifreeze that is leaking out of shoddy cooling-lines. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)