Baikonur Man

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 US space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of US government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments. On a cold gray morning in February 1988,