I've always admired the stubbornness with which the Russians insisted on taking their terrestrial lifestyles into space--no compromises, live in space on their terms, deal with it. It may seem a bit pathological to put up with cigarette smoke aboard a spacecraft (despite all those '50s sci-fi flicks with the hero casually flicking cigarette ashes on the spaceship dashboard), but still I have to admire them for it.

Years ago I started but didn't finish a photoessay about that aspect of life aboard Mir. American visitors started bringing back high-resolution digital images that gave me a chance to look closely around the interior at all the homey touches that were a testimony to humans living in space. Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite Mir interiors, storage compartments along a wall. Take a close look; keep an eye out for the bottle of Bailey's. I can't say for sure about the plastic baggie and roach clips in the lower right; hemeostats do in fact have civilian applications. But it's amusing to imagine a streak of rebelliousness among cosmonauts who had to actually live there and pushed back at the dictates of apparatchiks sitting in comfy chairs in Moscow.