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Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the US Space Programme
Space Policy 27 (2011) 60–61
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Space Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/spacepol
Book Review Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the US Space Programme, Jeffrey Manber. Apogee Books, Burlington, Canada, 2009 (332 pp., C$28.95, 9781 926592 084) Selling Peace is not an ordinary space book. Its Canadian publishers, Apogee, started out with mission reports from the Apollo programme, followed by a series of often quite technical books and histories, many of them with a detail sufficient to slake the hunger of any space geek. Selling Peace belongs to the biography (or autobiography) subset of space publishing, originally pioneered by astronauts writing memoirs and since followed by often retired engineers, designers, mission controllers and rocket builders, all gradually building up our knowledge of the early days of spaceflight. This is good because, once they are gone, this personal record might otherwise be lost. And this one is a first: the inside story of Russian–American commercialization. Selling Peace focuses on a relatively recent period of spaceflight history – the origins of space tourism, the commercialization of spaceflight; essentially 1986–2001 and the Russian–American relationship that led ultimately to the International Space Station (ISS). The writer, Jeffrey Manber, was in the thick of it, starting in 1986 after the Challenger disaster. Payload Systems, a company interested to fly small microgravity experiments in orbit, found itself grounded until such time as the Shuttle could be fixed to fly again. With some lateral thinking it decided to approach the arch-enemy, the USSR, to persuade it to fly its experimental box on the newlylaunched Mir space station. This required Payload Systems to negotiate a tangle of bureaucratic obstacles, starting with export licences from the State Department (where Manber originally worked), right up to President Reagan, with any number of people who might say ‘Nyet!’ en route. Eventually, Payload Systems did fly its box to Mir and began the commercialization of space exploration that has led us, after many twists and turns in the road, to Falcon and the new private companies like SpaceX that will build rockets and cabins for the USA’s post-Shuttle future. Manber weaves many elements of the story alongside each other: the commercialization of Mir, starting with the paying visit of Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama; the Shuttle–Mir programme; and the beginning of the ISS. The highlight was MirCorp, a company created to lease the Mir station for tourist flights. It is often forgotten that MirCorp actually accomplished the first privately funded manned space mission, when Alexander Kaleri and Sergei Zalotin flew on Soyuz TM-30 to refurbish Mir for tourist visitors in 2000. In the event this plan fell apart and Mir was deorbited in spring 2001 – but Manber and his colleagues had the satisfaction of watching Dennis Tito ride to orbit as the first tourist to the ISS and of seeing tourist missions subsequently become routine. Selling Peace is not a technical book at all – in places it reads like a cold war thriller, full of intrigue and laced by many comic
doi:10.1016/j.spacepol.2010.12.002
episodes. Manber knew little of Russia or its space programme before 1986 and he tells of his surprise, reactions to and impressions of the programme and the people who ran it, with traditions and approaches so very different from those of the USA. It is a story of villains and heroes. The heroes are the people who had a vision of commercializing space, like Walt Anderson, founder of MirCorp, and Dennis Tito who was prepared to go there. The Russians are heroes too, for their preparedness to turn their own world on its head and save their beloved space programme by dealing with their arch-enemy, embracing a commercial ideology they had been taught to reject all their adult lives. As for the villains, there are plenty of them, from American bureaucrats to the ogre of them all, NASA, which tried to block anyone dealing with a rival space agency. The Americans come out of this as the world’s worst bureaucrats. For example, federal contracts with Energiya obligated it to agree to surprise inspections to check on hygiene in its toilets and its meat storage facilities. Like many private enterprise evangelists, Manber has little time for NASA, especially its leader at the time, Dan Goldin. He is particularly critical of Goldin’s decision to deal with the Russian space agency, rather than with the Energiya Corporation, which actually had the capacity to deliver. I am not so sure about this: government agencies deal with government agencies and have only limited scope to bypass them. We don’t know Goldin’s point of view on all this, which is a pity: maybe he will one day write a memoir too. Manber conveys well the rival politics of space among the two great space contenders in the 1990s and their often chaotic intersections as they gradually came to realize that they could only save their respective manned space programmes by working together. Selling Peace is a story full of negotiations open and secret, phone calls, press leaks, conversations in hotel rooms, political interventions, tempers lost, vodka-swilling parties, endless patience, money wired to escrow accounts, murky dealings and cultural differences as Americans and Russians tried to do business for the first time. The under-the-radar account in Selling Peace fills an important gap in our knowledge of the period and it nicely complements the earlier work of Jim Oberg, whose Star-crossed Orbits chronicled the more official side of the Russian–American rapprochement. My one quarrel with the book is its subtitle: ‘Inside the Soviet conspiracy that transformed the US space programme’, for it is at odds with the story told in the book. Presumably it was formulated by the publisher to be eye-catching to the book browser. There was no conspiracy: the managers of the design bureaux in Russia were just plain desperate to get in foreign currency to sustain their space programme. The subtitle suggests that it was all a plot to destabilize NASA. That it did, and that was NASA’s fault, but it was not the purpose of the scheming Soviets. The Russians became very good at commercialization and by the mid-1990s had persuaded the French and German space agencies to pay for flights on Mir and
Book Review / Space Policy 27 (2011) 60–61
ESA to fly payloads on other spacecraft. At a time when many inside the country and without predicted its demise, Russia turned its space programme around from the most state-dependent to the most commercial in the world in just ten years. The years which Manber describes were its most telling test and the formative period that ultimately brought us the ISS.
61
Brian Harvey Terenure, Dublin 6W, Ireland E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 26 January 2011
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Space Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/spacepol
Book Review Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy that Transformed the US Space Programme, Jeffrey Manber. Apogee Books, Burlington, Canada, 2009 (332 pp., C$28.95, 9781 926592 084) Selling Peace is not an ordinary space book. Its Canadian publishers, Apogee, started out with mission reports from the Apollo programme, followed by a series of often quite technical books and histories, many of them with a detail sufficient to slake the hunger of any space geek. Selling Peace belongs to the biography (or autobiography) subset of space publishing, originally pioneered by astronauts writing memoirs and since followed by often retired engineers, designers, mission controllers and rocket builders, all gradually building up our knowledge of the early days of spaceflight. This is good because, once they are gone, this personal record might otherwise be lost. And this one is a first: the inside story of Russian–American commercialization. Selling Peace focuses on a relatively recent period of spaceflight history – the origins of space tourism, the commercialization of spaceflight; essentially 1986–2001 and the Russian–American relationship that led ultimately to the International Space Station (ISS). The writer, Jeffrey Manber, was in the thick of it, starting in 1986 after the Challenger disaster. Payload Systems, a company interested to fly small microgravity experiments in orbit, found itself grounded until such time as the Shuttle could be fixed to fly again. With some lateral thinking it decided to approach the arch-enemy, the USSR, to persuade it to fly its experimental box on the newlylaunched Mir space station. This required Payload Systems to negotiate a tangle of bureaucratic obstacles, starting with export licences from the State Department (where Manber originally worked), right up to President Reagan, with any number of people who might say ‘Nyet!’ en route. Eventually, Payload Systems did fly its box to Mir and began the commercialization of space exploration that has led us, after many twists and turns in the road, to Falcon and the new private companies like SpaceX that will build rockets and cabins for the USA’s post-Shuttle future. Manber weaves many elements of the story alongside each other: the commercialization of Mir, starting with the paying visit of Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama; the Shuttle–Mir programme; and the beginning of the ISS. The highlight was MirCorp, a company created to lease the Mir station for tourist flights. It is often forgotten that MirCorp actually accomplished the first privately funded manned space mission, when Alexander Kaleri and Sergei Zalotin flew on Soyuz TM-30 to refurbish Mir for tourist visitors in 2000. In the event this plan fell apart and Mir was deorbited in spring 2001 – but Manber and his colleagues had the satisfaction of watching Dennis Tito ride to orbit as the first tourist to the ISS and of seeing tourist missions subsequently become routine. Selling Peace is not a technical book at all – in places it reads like a cold war thriller, full of intrigue and laced by many comic
doi:10.1016/j.spacepol.2010.12.002
episodes. Manber knew little of Russia or its space programme before 1986 and he tells of his surprise, reactions to and impressions of the programme and the people who ran it, with traditions and approaches so very different from those of the USA. It is a story of villains and heroes. The heroes are the people who had a vision of commercializing space, like Walt Anderson, founder of MirCorp, and Dennis Tito who was prepared to go there. The Russians are heroes too, for their preparedness to turn their own world on its head and save their beloved space programme by dealing with their arch-enemy, embracing a commercial ideology they had been taught to reject all their adult lives. As for the villains, there are plenty of them, from American bureaucrats to the ogre of them all, NASA, which tried to block anyone dealing with a rival space agency. The Americans come out of this as the world’s worst bureaucrats. For example, federal contracts with Energiya obligated it to agree to surprise inspections to check on hygiene in its toilets and its meat storage facilities. Like many private enterprise evangelists, Manber has little time for NASA, especially its leader at the time, Dan Goldin. He is particularly critical of Goldin’s decision to deal with the Russian space agency, rather than with the Energiya Corporation, which actually had the capacity to deliver. I am not so sure about this: government agencies deal with government agencies and have only limited scope to bypass them. We don’t know Goldin’s point of view on all this, which is a pity: maybe he will one day write a memoir too. Manber conveys well the rival politics of space among the two great space contenders in the 1990s and their often chaotic intersections as they gradually came to realize that they could only save their respective manned space programmes by working together. Selling Peace is a story full of negotiations open and secret, phone calls, press leaks, conversations in hotel rooms, political interventions, tempers lost, vodka-swilling parties, endless patience, money wired to escrow accounts, murky dealings and cultural differences as Americans and Russians tried to do business for the first time. The under-the-radar account in Selling Peace fills an important gap in our knowledge of the period and it nicely complements the earlier work of Jim Oberg, whose Star-crossed Orbits chronicled the more official side of the Russian–American rapprochement. My one quarrel with the book is its subtitle: ‘Inside the Soviet conspiracy that transformed the US space programme’, for it is at odds with the story told in the book. Presumably it was formulated by the publisher to be eye-catching to the book browser. There was no conspiracy: the managers of the design bureaux in Russia were just plain desperate to get in foreign currency to sustain their space programme. The subtitle suggests that it was all a plot to destabilize NASA. That it did, and that was NASA’s fault, but it was not the purpose of the scheming Soviets. The Russians became very good at commercialization and by the mid-1990s had persuaded the French and German space agencies to pay for flights on Mir and
Book Review / Space Policy 27 (2011) 60–61
ESA to fly payloads on other spacecraft. At a time when many inside the country and without predicted its demise, Russia turned its space programme around from the most state-dependent to the most commercial in the world in just ten years. The years which Manber describes were its most telling test and the formative period that ultimately brought us the ISS.
61
Brian Harvey Terenure, Dublin 6W, Ireland E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 26 January 2011