Space is dangerous. Life in space unbearably fragile. Blasting across it in a rocket is daring enough, but to really claim it, to tame it, you have to stay there, to live in it. Only a few have tried, in every case their courage beyond question. Because in space even a fleck of paint can be deadly. Spacewalking outside the Mir station, though seemingly tranquil, is in effect walking at 18000 miles per hour. That one fleck of paint has the destructive power of a dum-dum bullet. Since 1992 astronauts and cosmonauts have been have been conducting an extraordinary living experiment as Russian and American character and method clatter headlong into one another. Mir is a 25-year-old space station coming to the end of its life in terrfying style. It has been the site of the worst ever fire in space, and a near fatal collision when a supply ship pierced the station's hull. This is a story that is space fact, not science fiction, sour Russians, intense Americans and a resourceful Briton battle to establish a homestead on the final frontier.