Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel

  • Robert Zimmerman
Joseph Henry Press: 2003. 528 pp. $27.95, £19.95

Ever since humans first dreamed of exploring the cosmos, the concept of the space station has stood at the forefront. Yet it was only in the early 1970s, nearly 15 years after the beginning of the space era, that both the Soviet Union and the United States launched their first modest space stations. The United States abandoned its impressive Skylab station in 1974, but the Soviets doggedly continued to build incrementally improved space stations of the Salyut series, until they discarded these to assemble the multimodular Mir space station in the late 1980s. These efforts were the forerunners of today's International Space Station (ISS), a continuously manned facility that has unfortunately inspired more headaches than hopes for future exploration.

In his substantial work Leaving Earth, Robert Zimmerman tells the story from the early missions of the Salyut and Skylab stations all the way to the current operations on the ISS. His focus is not on the science but on the human experience of developing and operating space stations and its attendant political context. He capably narrates stories of the numerous Soviet crews that visited the Salyut and Mir space stations in the 1970s and 1980s, an exercise that could have been repetitive and monotonous in less adept hands.

He engagingly describes how the Soviets gradually extended the endurance record in space — from a modest three months in 1977–78 on the Salyut-6 station to a year-and-a-half in 1994–95 on board Mir — and how, in so doing, they gathered enormous experience in maintaining human life beyond Earth. We learn of incompatible crews, repair expeditions, psychological problems, failed visits to stations and innovative refuelling exercises — all part of a decades-long learning experiment.

Zimmerman shows how, as missions grew longer, Soviet crews became more self-reliant in fixing problems, and ground control became increasingly flexible in reacting to unforeseen situations. By contrast, in the 1980s and 1990s the Americans, who were flying relatively short space-shuttle missions, planned astronauts' activities down to the last minute, with little of the flexible planning that characterized the early ground-breaking Skylab of the early 1970s. As Zimmerman explains, these different approaches to mission planning were highlighted most starkly during the final eventful missions to Mir when Americans worked as guests aboard the Russian station. Yet by the end, the Russians had learned to respect the capabilities of US astronauts, who in turn acknowledged that their approach to mission planning was far from optimal.

The book works on a narrow level, as an engaging narrative of human experiences with longer and longer space missions. But as a whole, it is deeply flawed. Zimmerman's explanations of the political imperatives and implications of the Soviet and US space-station programmes are naive. The extraordinary claim that “the [Soviet] space program that the communists supported and funded in their futile effort to reshape human nature helped wean Russia away from communism and dictatorship and toward freedom and capitalism” is so absurd that it undercuts much of the value of the book. Most Russians who experienced the fall of the Soviet Union or who study such things would be surprised to learn that space flight had anything at all to do with their path to a democratic society and the ultimate disintegration of the communist empire.

Also out of place are Zimmerman's frequent digressions about Leonid Brezhnev's alleged interference with the Soviet space missions of the 1970s and early 1980s. Reliable revelations from the past ten years or so — all of which Zimmerman ignores — seem to suggest exactly the opposite, that the Soviet space programme was not micro-managed at the topmost level.

Zimmerman also directs much vitriol against NASA, which he feels has lost direction since the halcyon days of the 1960s when it managed to accomplish such an extraordinary achievement as the Apollo Moon landings. Lamenting NASA's transformation into a top-down centralized bureaucracy that is incapable of innovation, he notes that “like ships passing in the night, the Russians have become freedom-loving capitalists, while the Americans have become control-loving freaks.”

NASA deserves criticism for many things, but Zimmerman's conclusions betray his simplistic understanding of NASA during the Apollo years. As Walter McDougall has pointed out in The Heavens and the Earth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), NASA won the Moon race for many reasons, but underlying the success was its functioning as a centralized, top-down bureaucracy with a single, highly politicized goal (to land on the Moon before the end of the decade) and a lot of money.

If Zimmerman's work is undone by his forays into political history, his book is still useful as a narrative of human space exploration from the 1970s onwards. As such, it is best read piecemeal, skipping the bits on politics and following the story of the missions that extended the human capability to live in space.