Starfire is a science fiction novel by author Paul Preuss. First published in February 1988, it is about a group of NASA astronauts on a mission to an asteroid which is falling into the Sun. According to the novel's afterword, Preuss and Gary Gutierrez, special visual effects supervisor on the films The Right Stuff and Top Gun, first conceived the story as a realistic science fiction film. When they realized that the film would be too expensive to make, Preuss turned the story into a novel. Preuss and Gutierrez share the book's copyright. Source: Wikipedia (en)