As an object lesson in how NOT to manage projects, "Dragonfly" is a wonderful account of how things can go wrong when basic precautions against disaster are not taken.
Played out against a background of political expediency, managerial incompetence and technical disasters, this book details the mutual mistrust between the Americans and Russians during that period when they mounted joint missions to the Russian space station Mir. The American astronauts, for the most part, had the "right stuff": gung-ho arrogance towards their Russian counterparts. The Russians, for their part, with far more experience at managing long-term space expeditions, looked down on the Americans as naive incompetents. It was a marriage made in hell.
Predictably, soon things were going very wrong indeed. There were several potentially fatal disasters, most notably when a new and untested automatic docking system aboard the "Progress" supply ship failed at exactly the wrong time, causing the vessel to slam into the space station and holing it. For the blameless Russian commander of Mir, that was the end of his career. And then there was the oxygen bottle which caught fire and blowtorched the interior of the space station, the seriousness of which was denied by both sides.
Bryan Burrough has a clear and lucid writing style, and the pace of the book is genuinely exciting as we move from one bad decision and disaster to another. It's a genuine miracle that none of the brave astro/cosmonauts lost their life aboard Mir. No thanks, of course, to the politicians and incompetent management on both sides. A gripping read. Every aspiring project manager should read it.
Played out against a background of political expediency, managerial incompetence and technical disasters, this book details the mutual mistrust between the Americans and Russians during that period when they mounted joint missions to the Russian space station Mir. The American astronauts, for the most part, had the "right stuff": gung-ho arrogance towards their Russian counterparts. The Russians, for their part, with far more experience at managing long-term space expeditions, looked down on the Americans as naive incompetents. It was a marriage made in hell.
Predictably, soon things were going very wrong indeed. There were several potentially fatal disasters, most notably when a new and untested automatic docking system aboard the "Progress" supply ship failed at exactly the wrong time, causing the vessel to slam into the space station and holing it. For the blameless Russian commander of Mir, that was the end of his career. And then there was the oxygen bottle which caught fire and blowtorched the interior of the space station, the seriousness of which was denied by both sides.
Bryan Burrough has a clear and lucid writing style, and the pace of the book is genuinely exciting as we move from one bad decision and disaster to another. It's a genuine miracle that none of the brave astro/cosmonauts lost their life aboard Mir. No thanks, of course, to the politicians and incompetent management on both sides. A gripping read. Every aspiring project manager should read it.
