Out of Orbit (17 page)

The scale of change didn’t truly hit them until the fall, when a replacement crew was scheduled to arrive at Mir. Artsebarski would be switched out for Aleksandr Volkov, commander for commander. But instead of including a flight engineer to take Krikalev’s place, Star City sent an undertrained Kazakh, Toktar Aubakirov, and an Austrian researcher named Franz Viehbock along for the ride. The Austrian’s place had been guaranteed by a big check. Aubakirov’s inclusion was political, a concession to a new reality. With the Soviet Union on the verge of collapsing in on itself, there were fears that the increasingly sovereign nation of Kazakhstan might deny Russia access to the Baikonur Cosmodrome and thus to space. So, just to be safe, Aubakirov would jump the line and enjoy a short
stay on Mir—keeping the Kazakhs happily receptive—and Krikalev would see his tour of duty extended indefinitely. After a tense changeover period, Artsebarski high-fived his friend and ducked out of Mir, taking the Kazakh and the Austrian back to earth with him.

In the quiet that followed, Krikalev pressed his new commander for news.

The ground also passed tidbits along: “There’s a mixed international company talking to you, from a brand-new control center with a brand-new map. The Baltic States have already got a different color. And the Kuril Islands are preparing for a change of color, too.”

Gorbachev made way for Boris Yeltsin, the hammer and sickle for red, white, and blue, Leningrad for St. Petersburg.

Finally, in March 1992, Krikalev’s belated ride home rocketed toward Mir. He packed his things, listened to the radio, and stared out the window some more.

“Last year, you left the Soviet Union,” a reporter said to him from the ground. “Now, you return to Russia. How do you feel about such drastic changes?”

In response, there was only silence.

On March 25, a record 310 days after waving goodbye to his family through the window on a bus, the last Soviet citizen was lifted out of his scorched
Soyuz
capsule. Although he had run on a treadmill for two hours every day, Krikalev was too weak to walk or stand. He was placed in a chair and carried like a sultan to a recovery tent. His original commander, Anatoli Artsebarski, was waiting there with sunglasses. He feared that the bright colors Krikalev had seen only through the filter of space might now hurt his eyes.

Still in his blue flight suit, he was bundled into a plane and flown back to Moscow. He smiled when the flight attendant came by with her drinks cart.

Krikalev’s first taste of his brave new world was a can of Coke.

·   ·   ·

Maps and soda aside, the blurring of lines continued. In June 1992, to liven up their lackluster summit, President Bush and Boris Yeltsin
came to yet another space cooperation agreement. It was decided again that an American would visit Mir, but this time around, two Russians would fly aboard the shuttle. After Bush lost that November’s election, political upheaval once again forced a change in plans.

Not long after Bill Clinton had won the White House and begun reviewing the books, his administration coldcocked NASA with a 20 percent budget cut. That kind of money couldn’t be found by cutting back on paper clips and magazine subscriptions. Something real had to disappear. And there was only one line in the budget that could be hacked out without killing the rest of the leviathan: Space Station Freedom.

Nine years after it had been proposed by Ronald Reagan—“America has always been greatest when we dare to be great,” he had said in his launching of the project—NASA’s late answer to Mir had morphed from white star to white elephant. There wasn’t a single piece of hardware to show for the $8 billion that already had been dropped on it. And with $23 billion in projected additional costs, the price of Freedom was, for the first time in the history of the American space program, just too high. Overnight the blueprints were torn up and tossed away, and 20,000 engineers and technicians suddenly lost their footing. By late afternoon the next day, a sense of united purpose had given way to shock.

In the frantic weeks that followed, scaled-down redesigns were floated in the hopes of salvaging something from the wreckage. They weren’t successful until Russia’s star chasers, as though on cue, found the entrepreneurial spirit that only its Mafia had yet tapped. Maybe, they suggested coyly, a new space station was something the two countries could build together: the cash-strapped Russians, who had taken to working with the lights off to save money, would bring their long-honed but underfinanced expertise; the Americans would bring most of the bankroll.

Of course, the trade was a little more complicated than the usual fee-for-service. Building a space station is a communal exercise, which the Russians knew something about. It’s also an expensive one, which the Americans had learned only too well. That was
all true enough. But their money would give the Americans more than a light in the sky. It would also give them the leverage they needed to push the newly liberated Russians down a more righteous path than they’d seemed inclined to take on their own. Rather than hawking their nuclear secrets to India or Iran, Russia’s fledgling democracy would be built on a more benign foundation. And the Russian engineers who had been sprung into underworld mercenary careers by their bouncing paychecks might now find reason to stay onside. What the Americans were buying themselves, in essence, was a tied-up bundle of guarantees, in space and on the ground. It was a honeypot deal.

And so, in September 1993, U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced joint plans for the International Space Station. Canada, Japan, the eleven members of the European Space Agency, and Brazil decided to play along, but the meat of the matter remained the same: the Americans would pay the Russians to help them build the station that had been too long in coming.

To fill the wait, the Americans handed the Russians a $400 million down payment, in exchange for training a corps of long-duration astronauts and, over the next several years, stowing seven of them on board Mir. Abiding by the original agreement between presidents Bush and Yeltsin, NASA would also play host to a pair of Russians on the shuttle.

On February 3, 1994, the first of those Russians tagged along for a routine mission on
Discovery
. He was none other than Sergei Krikalev, the flight engineer who was just getting his land legs back after his extended mission on Mir. Now he escaped to a place more familiar than this world had become. “There were those who said I should have stayed on Mir,” Krikalev said. “Things were better up there.”

A year to the day later, Vladimir Titov buckled into Krikalev’s seat on
Discovery
, this time en route to Mir for a mock docking, one last rehearsal in the run-up toward ultimate union. With Jim Wetherbee at the controls—the same veteran astronaut who later shuttled Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin to the International Space
Station—the Americans again demonstrated their mastery of distance.
Discovery
nearly kissed Mir, traveling thousands of miles before stopping within forty feet of its one-day destination.

Wetherbee had penned a speech to mark the momentous flyby. “As we are bringing our spaceships together, we are bringing our nations together,” he read. “The next time we approach, we will shake your hand, and together we will lead the world into the next millennium.”

Looking out at
Discovery
through his breath-fogged window, Russian commander Aleksandr Viktorenko was less prepared but no less prophetic. “This is almost like a fairy tale,” he said. “It’s too good to be true.”

·   ·   ·

In February 1994, not long after Sergei Krikalev had made his shuttle flight, the first American astronauts began training at Star City, where a vast but now decaying complex sprawled out. There were gray apartment blocks and cottages set aside for the cosmonauts, ancient mock-ups sunk to the bottom of giant water tanks,
Soyuz
simulators, chalkboard-lined study halls, and gyms filled with treadmills and old-school exercise bikes. When this bleak campus wasn’t bleached white with winter, it was a frayed patchwork of Russian institutional chic: everything was painted with the same dull slate of grays, greens, and blues. The washed-out palette added to the ill feeling of the place, that it was the home of so much faded glory.

Now it was home to a small band of Americans, too, about to embark on crash courses in all things Russian: language, technology, philosophy, food and drink. That vast program of study was made harder by deep freezes, culture shock, homesickness, and all of the small, wearing skirmishes that follow détentes. The power plays marked the start of a long feeling-out process between old enemies who were not yet friends.

The Russians were difficult to get to know, resistant to Houston’s wide smiles and firm handshakes, but with time, small truths trickled to the surface. While the American astronauts were individuals, relative freethinkers and independent spirits, the Russians
seemed cloned from a single prototype. They yielded to authority and obeyed without question, willing to take unreasonable chances so long as they were ordered to. With less emphasis on the individual, there was less value placed on an individual’s life, and cosmonauts had been turned into fatalists in the most literal sense. Many of them believed in their hearts that they would one day die in space, and they had become almost mechanical in their march toward that grim destiny. One of the Western imports, Mike Foale, thought of his Russian colleagues as slaves. He used the word not lightly but a lot.

From that foundation sprang everything else. The Russians’ appetite for doom sometimes fed the fearlessness they were legendary for, like those two spacewalking cosmonauts who had staked their lives on a thin tether to pick that bag of garbage out of Mir’s docking port. But that machismo was also born of necessity. With long-duration flights, there wasn’t a chance to bring things down to earth and study them and decide on an optimal course of action through diagrams and decision trees. That was the American way. The Russians just got it done because they had to. Otherwise they fell out of the sky.

That, in turn, fostered in them a certain roughshod practicality. If Star City’s Mission Control became infested with mice, which it did, cats were brought in. When it was discovered that pens didn’t work in zero gravity, with nothing to draw down the ink, the Americans spent millions developing a pen that could write upside down. The Russians packed pencils.

They were more willing to make do and to make do without, relying instead on an almost comical catalog of superstitions to carry themselves through. Their preflight routine remains cast largely by missions past, each new rhythm layered on top of the last. Cosmonauts visit Yuri Gagarin’s office, frozen like a time capsule, and pay silent homage; each bus ferrying them to the launchpad has a horseshoe stashed in it, as well as those bundles of fragrant wormwood twigs; that same bus will stop to give the cosmonauts one last chance to climb out and water down the right rear tire, the way Gagarin had relieved himself before his historic first flight; in the
night before their ceremonial pissing, they will have watched a film called
White Sun of the Desert
for the hundredth time, reciting every line from memory. No one can remember why they must watch this one movie, exactly, but they do, always and without argument.

·   ·   ·

In March 1995, Norman Thagard became the first American astronaut to live aboard Mir. Two new American science modules, Spektr and Priroda—late additions to Mir’s design and products of the newly hatched plan for intergalactic cooperation—had not yet been added to the dragonfly’s back, and Thagard found himself in an environment nearly as hostile as the vacuum around it.

Mir’s walls were covered with equipment, strapped down or bundled into place, years of debris that had built up like newspapers in an old man’s apartment. It could take hours to find something in the mess, a bizarre collection of the vital (laptop computers and tools) and the frivolous (movies and cassettes of Russian folk music, finger paintings sent up by schoolchildren, and a strange poster of a woman with her big dog). The cramped modules were connected by hatches just three feet wide, and even they had been clogged with dozens of cables, extension cords, and ventilation tubes. The sleeping compartments were small, worn-seeming, and barren, adorned only with shaving mirrors. They added to the feeling that something about the whole place was uncomfortably ramshackle. Two treadmills sat in the base block, and if a cosmonaut ran at a particular pace, the frequency of his rhythm could cause the entire station to oscillate, as happens when someone jumps into a canoe.

And Mir stank. Sometimes it smelled like a junkyard, thanks to frequent antifreeze leaks that left bubbles of coolant splashing into walls. More often it smelled like sweat. With no shower and a limited supply of water—so short that there were plans for the crew’s own urine to be captured and distilled—Thagard and company could only wipe themselves down every three days, and T-shirts had to last them two weeks. To the horror of the Americans, the Russians
had taken to lighting up cigarettes, more out of the desperate need for a change in whiff than for the nicotine buzz.

Not surprisingly, Thagard didn’t thrive. As well as suffering through the anxiety of a series of technical glitches (a faulty freezer ruined most of his experiments, leaving him underworked), he experienced rapid and alarming weight loss. He shed seventeen pounds in his first six weeks in orbit, dropping him from an already skinny 158 pounds to 141. In an effort to counteract this decay, he was put on a rigorous exercise program. But when he started working out with rubber expanders looped around his feet, one of the straps came loose, and he whomped himself in the eye, damaging his cornea. By the time the shuttle
Atlantis
docked at Mir at the end of June, Thagard was ready to get back home. His 115 days in space had broken the American endurance record set by Skylab’s third crew, but it had nearly broken him, too. He retired from NASA soon after his return.