Out of Orbit (18 page)

The second of the Americans on Mir, Shannon Lucid, had a better go of things. She was the first to enjoy roaming around the two new U.S. modules—floating from the salt-stained base block into the fresh digs was like stepping out from shadows and into the sun—and her easygoing personality saw her shrugging off some of the problems that had affected Thagard to his core. Even bum plays somehow worked out: a six-week delay in her retrieval flight allowed her to set the world endurance record for a woman in space. (Between March and September 1996, she had spent 179 days gravity-free.) She also landed her smiling self on the cover of
Newsweek
. After a too-long absence, American astronauts seemed poised to return to the ranks of heroes.

Unfortunately, Lucid’s replacement had trouble shouldering the role. The Russians had resisted the inclusion of John Blaha from the beginning. Their psychological testing, much more refined than the Americans’ rudimentary understanding of what space can do to your head, revealed that Blaha was too dependent on outside support and too much of a perfectionist to find happiness inside fly-by-night Mir. The Americans had no one to replace him with, however;
the line of volunteers willing to spend eighteen months training in Star City was short. Blaha launched.

Almost immediately, problems arose. He clashed with his crewmates, commander Valery Korzun and flight engineer Aleksandr Kaleri. The simmering conflict was made worse by Blaha’s poor Russian. He felt increasingly isolated. He also fell behind the optimistic science schedule that had been drawn up for him in Houston. Still learning their way, the Americans governed the lives of their astronauts by a high holy document known as Form 24, which structured the course of their mission, minute by minute, day by day. That’s how shuttle flights had always been conducted. But over the course of their long-duration assignments, each of the astronauts began to grate under the thumb of the ground, Blaha in particular.

Trying to catch up, he began cutting back on his sleep, much to the concern of his crewmates, who didn’t like the look in his tired eyes. Soon Blaha was getting only three hours of rest each night. With time, even those short spells became scattershot. Fatigue and stress combined to push Blaha into a deep depression.

Eventually he came out of it, after finding solace in his softening crewmates, English conversation on Mir’s ham radio, and comfort in watching tapes of old football games that were sent up to him. That was enough to get him through to the other side, and by January, he had learned how to get along in space. It had just taken him time.

When Blaha reached the end of his mission, he returned safely to earth. Like Norman Thagard before him, he gave up on the astronaut business shortly thereafter. Although he had some good memories of his time in orbit, there were many more that seemed like bad dreams, and if he was going to have any chance of leaving them behind, he decided, he needed to make a clean break.

·   ·   ·

Blaha’s successor, Jerry Linenger, would bring his nightmares back with him, mostly because they were easier to quantify. The first came on February 23, 1997, during one of Mir’s cramped changeover periods. There were six men on board: Linenger, Korzun, and
Kaleri, as well as the newly arrived replacements for the two Russians (commander Vasily Tsibliyev and flight engineer Aleksandr “Sasha” Lazutkin) and a way-paying German, Reinhold Ewald. Even before then, Linenger had battled growing frustration. Like Blaha, he had had trouble building friendships with his crewmates. He had also begun looking sideways at Mir, which felt to him as though it was on the brink of collapse. Some 1,600 breakdowns would plague it over its lifetime, but Mir was beset by almost routine failure during Linenger’s tenure. The coolant leaks worsened; oxygen generators conked out; condensation formed on the walls and behind panels; the power flickered off and so did the climate control system, spiking temperatures to 90 degrees; the main computers crashed; and communication with the ground turned sporadic and ratty.

But even the worst of those complaints was made to seem like a trivial inconvenience when an oxygen generator that was being changed in Kvant caught fire, spitting out a blowtorchlike flame and filling the module with white smoke.

“
Pozhar!
” someone cried out. Although Linenger’s Russian remained limited, this word he knew.

Two members of the crew tried to smother the flame with a wet towel, but it, too, caught fire. Fed by the oxygen streaming out of the generator, the flame grew and turned blue. Liquid metal began floating through the module, threatening to spread the blaze like sparks blowing off a forest fire.

Korzun scrambled for an extinguisher. He pointed it at the fire and—nothing. It didn’t work. Banging it around, he lost it in the smoke, which was turning from white to black.

That was it. The crew scattered, looking for oxygen masks and a way out. One of the
Soyuz
capsules was readied for launch. In the chaos, it was forgotten that the second was on the other side of the fire. Now a grim realization surfaced through the confusion: for three of the men, there was no escape.

Korzun, sweating and swearing, dug out another extinguisher from the piles. This one worked, and he emptied it in the direction of the fire. He didn’t find all of it.

Now the generator was in the middle of the module, spinning, propelled by the flame like a rocket. The fire licked the walls, scorching them black and threatening to melt Mir’s hull. If it burned through, the fire would have finally been snuffed out by the loss of atmosphere, the lives of six men gone along with it.

Beyond desperate, Korzun found a third extinguisher. This time, he caught just enough of the flame to put it out.

In the aftermath, the Russians told the Americans that the fire had lasted ninety seconds. Linenger said it was more like fifteen minutes. But for once, time didn’t really matter. It couldn’t be measured by a clock. It had been measured in heartbeats, and how few the crew had thought that they had left.

·   ·   ·

Linenger’s second near-miss came less than two weeks later. Life inside Mir was just returning to normal. Korzun, Kaleri, and Ewald had dropped back to earth. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were settling in nicely, at least until the Russians decided to run a test.

Mir, like Salyut, was supplied between manned missions by
Progress
. Its dockings had always been automated, but the necessary electronics—specifically, the Kurs radar system—were proving too expensive in the new Russia, especially given that they were used once and then burned into oblivion. The idea was hatched to make the process manual. The ground would guide the ship within striking distance of Mir; the commander inside would take over, calling out signals with his computer and controlling the rocket’s thrusts with a joystick, ushering the ship the rest of the way. Tsibliyev would be the first to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the test run, with the
Progress
somewhere out there rocketing toward Mir, Tsibliyev’s monitor—his eyes, in effect—filled with static. He was flying blind.

Lazutkin ordered Linenger into their
Soyuz
to prepare for evacuation. Tsibliyev jetted between his controls and the window, hoping to catch sight of the
Progress
before it crashed into Mir. He couldn’t see it against the black. His screen remained a blizzard. He
bit his lip and began furiously cranking the joystick that dictated the
Progress
’s flight path and, in turn, the fate of his crew.

The
Progress
missed colliding with the station by only two hundred meters—a whisper by galactic standards—like a torpedo diving away from a dead-in-the-water sub.

Facing down death twice did Linenger in. He stopped talking to the ground. He also refused to take part in his weekly medical conference. He believed that Americans should never again come to Mir. He wanted the exchange program to stop with him. Otherwise, he argued, the next man in line had a real chance of not coming back.

The next man in line was Mike Foale.

·   ·   ·

At first, Foale’s arrival breathed new life into Mir. He was easygoing and good with Russian, eager to learn and friendly. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin, having never connected with Linenger, were happy for Foale’s warm company. Although they continued to battle coolant leaks, the three men were something like content.

April gave way to May, May to June. Then came nervous news from the ground: they would like to try docking the
Progress
manually again.

The timing was bad. Tsibliyev was tired after diving face-first into a bubble of antifreeze, which left him feeling poisoned. He had also been conducting a series of sleep experiments, during which he had to wake up throughout the night and draw blood from himself.

To make matters worse, the Russians had decided that rather than risk shorting out the monitor again, they would stop the flow of telemetry data, which was what had interfered with the broadcast signal during the first attempt. Trouble was, that data gave the commander the speed and range of the incoming ship. Without it, he would have to estimate the approach using a handheld laser range finder and a stopwatch.

It was a formula for disaster: ethylene glycol plus fatigue plus a big rocket heading toward a last-legs space station, at a speed and range that was, at best, a best guess.

Then the brakes didn’t work.

The
Progress
suddenly appeared through Mir’s window too soon, and far too late for any evasive action. Lazutkin, who had been on the lookout, had time only to close his eyes and turn his head.

Tsibliyev saw the look on Lazutkin’s face and knew. “Oh, hell,” he said.

There was a shudder, like an earthquake. The
Progress
drove a hole into a solar array, wedged itself against the station, broke free, and came in for a second run. This time it hit Spektr, and this time it punched through the hull. The master alarm sounded. “We have decompression!” Tsibliyev shouted. “Hell, Sasha. That’s it!”

Lazutkin swam to Spektr and heard a sound no astronaut had ever lived to describe: the angry hiss that air makes when it’s rushing out into space.

The more immediate problem was that he couldn’t close Spektr’s hatch, which was blocked by ventilation tubes and no fewer than eighteen cables.

With the pressure inside the station dropping rapidly—780 … 700 … 690 … 680 … 675 … 670—Lazutkin began frantically pulling apart the cables. He got through fifteen of them in three minutes. The three that were left had no visible disconnect. He found a knife and cut through the first two, which turned out to be data lines. He sliced into the last cable and sparks shot up his arm. It was a power cable, and it couldn’t be cut.

Tsibliyev opened up some spare oxygen tanks, hoping to buy the crew some time. Foale worked to prepare their
Soyuz
for evacuation. Wondering where in the hell the Russians were, he kicked back toward Spektr and found Lazutkin trying to find the power cord’s plug. Finally he did and set about closing the hatch, but even with Foale’s help, he couldn’t. They had to pull it toward them, but the force of the air rushing through the hatch and out of the hole in the hull was too great. In order to close the hatch, they’d have to wait for the pressure to equalize. Too bad their blood would be boiling by then.

Struck by panicked inspiration, Foale and Lazutkin rushed to
find the lid that had covered the hatch when the module was delivered. Somehow, under all of that junk, they did, and they slammed it into place.

The rest of Mir and their lives were saved. But Spektr was lost. Foale’s sleeping compartment, his personal effects, and half of the American experiments were on the other side of that lid. So was pure, open space.

They had also lost the power generated by Spektr’s four solar arrays, leaving the station alive but limping, lost in free drift. The crew stopped the slow roll by firing their
Soyuz
capsule’s thrusters, and they managed to restore some of their power supply, but over the coming weeks, they would have to set their minds toward a “space walk” inside the station, trying to patch Spektr’s hull and reconnect the cables that had run through the open hatch.

Normally the two Russians would have done it, but buried under post-collision stress, Tsibliyev began suffering an irregular heartbeat. He was scrubbed from the fix-it mission and replaced by Foale, a move that pushed Tsibliyev closer to psychological collapse. He would spend the coming days in tears. Pools of water collected around his eyes, refusing to run down his cheeks.

In the end, Star City decided to postpone the work, sending up a fresh crew to make the repair. Commander Anatoli Solovyov and flight engineer Pavel Vinogradov joined Foale in August. They suited up and headed into Spektr.

They reconnected some of the cables, and they retrieved Foale’s personal effects—photographs of his wife and children and his toothbrush, all of the essentials—but they failed to find the hole that the
Progress
had knocked into Spektr. The hatch would have to remain closed, the module never again part of the machine, except in a series of photographs that were beamed down to earth, showing a battered ship that had come so close to becoming a coffin.

·   ·   ·

In light of those images and the horror they invoked, debate raged in NASA’s corridors about the future of the Mir program. Jerry Linenger, who would soon become the third of the American Mir
astronauts to quit the corps, railed especially hard against a continued presence on the crippled station. The sticky thing was, had the Americans decided against stamping their tickets to Mir, the Russians would almost certainly have pulled out of the International Space Station, which still had strong backing from the Clinton White House. The two remaining missions would have to be completed, if only for appearances.

Not surprisingly, however, NASA couldn’t smoke out many volunteers to fill the final two slots. The sixth American on Mir, Dave Wolf, was a big-drinking daredevil who had nearly had his pilot’s license revoked for buzzing houses near Houston. Wolf saw in Mir his last chance for redemption, and he made the most of it. Although he spent nearly half of his mission, between September 1997 and January 1998, wiping up water puddles and condensation, his easy spirit made him the unlikely savior of a long-money program.