Marooned on Mars: Mind-Spinning Books for Software Engineers

Dragonfly - NASA and the Crisis Aboard MIR (New York: HarperCollins Publishers), the story of the Russian-American misadventures on MIR. An expose with almost embarrassing detail about the inner-workings of Johnson Space Center in Houston, this book is best read with the JSC organization chart in hand. Here's the real world of engineering and life in extreme environments. It makes most other accounts of "requirements analysis" appear glib and simplistic. The book vividly portrays the sometimes harrowing experiences of the American astronauts in the web of Russian interpersonal relations and literally in the web of MIR's wiring. Burrough's exposition reveals how handling bureaucratic procedures and bulky facilities is as much a matter of moxie and goodwill as technical capability. Lessons from MIR showed NASA that getting to Mars required a different view of knowledge and improvisation-long-duration missions are not at all like the scripted and pre-engineered flights of Apollo or the Space Shuttle.