WAYSTATION TO THE STARS

The unusual tale of British-American astronaut Michael Foale’s near-disastrous—and ultimately heroic’sojourn on the Russian space station Mir is made even more unusual in being told by his father. But Colin Foale is uniquely qualified to tell an astronaut’s story, since he was a career RAF pilot. And, of course, he knows intimately of his son’s desire from childhood to go into space. Michael Foale’s first six weeks on Mir, he says, were a —halcyon— fulfillment of that dream, spent mostly with agricultural experiments and observing the obsessive attempts of the two Russians to trace an ominous ethylene glycol leak. Then, from June through October of 1997, a tale rivaling that of Apollo 13 unfolded, beginning when the Russian resupply ship collided with Mir instead of docking. The two Russians were able to remedy an initial drop in air pressure that briefly caused all three passengers to contemplate escape in a Soyuz capsule. But there was also systemic damage: The accident disoriented Mir’s attitude toward the sun, so that the station had difficulty generating power through its solar arrays. The elder Foale, not just Michael’s father but a clever writer, chooses this moment in the narrative to reveal that his other son, Christopher, died in a car accident, thus heightening the reader’s concern for Michael, and showing that every astronaut’s story is also a family story. Foale is deeply proud of his son, who in the next several weeks used his ’splendid— Cambridge education to resolve the worst of Mir’s problems, calculating by the stars and the sun how to reorient the craft manually and start generating power again. A bracing tale of valor and a father’s love, graced by the elder Foale’s grasp of the details of spacefaring. (14 color and 16 b&w photos)