Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir

“An engrossing report.”—Booklist“Vividly captures the challenges and privations [Dr. Linenger] endured both before and during his flight.”—Library JournalNothing on earth compares to Off the Planet—Dr. Jerry Linenger’s dramatic account of space exploration turned survival mission during his 132 days aboard the decaying and unstable Russian space station Mir.Not since Apollo 13 has an American astronaut faced so many catastrophic malfunctions and life-threatening emergencies in one mission. In his remarkable narrative, Linenger chronicles power outages that left the crew in complete darkness, tumbling out of control; chemical leaks and near collisions that threatened to rupture Mir’s hull; and most terrifying of all—a raging fire that almost destroyed the space station and the lives of its entire crew.

Capt. Jerry M. Linenger, M.D., Ph.D., is a retired U.S. Navy flight surgeon and NASA astronaut. A naval academy graduate, Dr. Linenger holds a doctorate in epidemiology, a master's in systems management, and a master's in public health policy. He has also been awarded three honorary doctorate degrees in science. During his mission aboard Mir, he logged fifty million miles in more than two thousand Earth orbits. He was the first American to undock from the space station in Soyuz spacecraft and the first American to spacewalk wearing a Russian spacesuit outside a foreign craft. At the completion of his mission, he had spent more continuous time in space than any male American.