Everything seemed built on an immense, heroic scale, a legacy of the Soviet days. He was shown a giant mock-up of the old Mir station, a spacesuit display, and a hydro pool where the Russians planned their spacewalks. There was a culture centre, and a giant memorial to Gagarin. The first cosmonaut of them all stood heroically, one hand behind his back, looking up at the stars.

There was even a planetarium, intended, Arkady told him seriously, for the cosmonauts to learn interplanetary navigation for the Soviet mission to Mars which had never come. In the planetarium foyer was a mockup of the spacecraft which could have achieved the mission, perhaps in the early 1990s, assembled from hauntingly familiar components: Energia heavy-lift boosters, a Mir-based habitat module, a Mars lander built around Proton booster rocket stages.

But those dreams were long gone.

He was taken to gladhand the staff at TsUP, Russia’s mission control at the unremarkable little town of Korolyov, outside Moscow. The control room looked like a small cinema, with a big screen to show the Station’s trajectory curving over Earth’s surface, and four rows of consoles dating from the 1980s. Under the screens there were two big sponsors” banners, one from a US computer firm which had supplied the latest set of pcs that supplemented the older equipment, and one, bizarrely, from the Red October chocolate factory, with a slogan about celebrating “shared Russian traditions of quality’. The most useful piece of equipment looked to be a plastic model of the Space Station, which got more attention from the controllers than the screen images.

The cosmonauts still earned a decent wage, but even that was mostly funded by American money funnelled through the Station project, and many of the engineers and controllers, bringing home less than a couple of hundred bucks a month, worked as cab drivers and cleaners in Moscow to cover their bills.

It seemed to Henry the disparity between space dream and reality was even harsher here than in the US.

Most of the training forced on him here, it turned out, was in emergency procedures.

Henry was heavily briefed on what to do if a Station module was slow-punctured by a micrometeorite, and what would happen if there were a failure of the booster in the early stages of launch (an escape rocket would haul the manned capsule clear — a lot of noise and shaking, high Gs, probable unconsciousness, a spell in hospital). It wasn’t that there was anything for him to do in such an eventuality, but it was thought better for him to know what would hit him.

Henry, exhausted, disoriented, overtrained and bewildered, didn’t agree.