The Orbital Perspective

CHAPTER TWO

Space, the Shared Frontier

Early one morning in March 1994, thirty-five-year-old NASA flight surgeon Mike Barratt was riding in the backseat of a Soviet-era Volga with a cracked windshield. He was traveling from Moscow to meet with his counterpart at Roscosmos, Russian flight doctor Igor Shekhovtsov. Barratt, who in 2000 would be selected into the eighteenth class of astronauts, along with me and fifteen others, was assigned as the flight surgeon for astronaut Norm Thagard’s historic first U.S. mission aboard Mir. As flight surgeon, Barratt was responsible for coordinating all medical aspects of the mission and ensuring that Thagard ...