Life was very different in 1989. A trip to the movie theater cost less than $4, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” was newly released, and the World Wide Web had just been invented. That year, Michael Fincke, a recent MIT grad who had just completed a BS in aeronautics and astronautics and Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, set foot for the first time in Moscow. It was one of the last summers before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Fincke had seen a poster written in Russian hanging in a hall…
