"Too Far from Home captures the hazardous realities of space travel. Every time an astronaut makes the trip into space, he faces the possibility of death from the slightest mechanical error or instance of bad luck: a cracked O-ring, an errant piece of space junk, an oxygen leak ... there are a myriad of frighteningly probable events that would result in an astronaut's death. In fact, twenty-one people who have attempted the journey have been killed." "Yet for a special breed of individual, the call of space is worth the risk: men such as U.S. astronauts Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox, and Russian flight engineer Nikolai Budarin, who in November 2002 left on what was to be a routine fourteen-week mission maintaining the international Space Station." "But then, on February 1, 2003, the Columbia exploded beneath them. Despite the numerous news reports examining the tragedy, the public remained largely unaware that three men remained orbiting Earth. With the launch program suspended indefinitely, these astronauts has suddenly lost their ride home." "Too Far from Home chronicles the efforts of the beleaguered Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow as they work frantically against the clock to bring their men safely back to Earth, ultimately settling on a plan that felt, at best, like a long shot." "Latched to the side of the space station was a Russian-built Soyuz TMA-1 capsule with outdated technology and a questionable safety record (in 1971 a malfunction in the Soyuz 11 capsule left three Russian astronauts dead). Despite the inherent danger, the Soyuz became the only hope to return Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit home."--BOOK JACKET.
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