Baikonur Man: Space, Science, American Ambition, and Soviet Chaos at the Cold War's End

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Rich Miller
Audiobook
6 hr 35 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

Against the backdrop of the late Cold War, a tiny American start-up company forged a secret deal to place American scientific payloads aboard the Soviet space station MIR. Born out of sheer desperation after the Challenger explosion and grounding of the United States space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of United States government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments.



On a cold gray morning in February 1988, the company founder met with three graduate students and their professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put his plans into action. Baikonur Man, written by one of those students, recounts the subsequent five-year saga of how science, comradery, hardship, drama, and occasional lunacy led to the first American experiments and payloads to fly on Russian rockets.

About the author

Barry Stoddard graduated from Whitman College and earned his doctorate from MIT. After training at the University of California in Berkeley, he joined the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, where he has run a research laboratory ever since. He lives in Washington with his wife. Rich Miller has performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County. He also starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat.

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