by Chris Jones
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 str
ess, 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.
Australian-born Andy Thomas, despite his limited Russian, was chosen to make the final trip. His 130-day stay would prove NASA’s third-longest, after Lucid’s and Foale’s. Among the Russians who shared his company was a smiling, stocky cosmonaut named Nikolai Budarin.
· · ·
A husband and the father of two boys, Budarin had begun his career in 1976 as an engineer for ENERGIA, Russia’s massive space technology contractor. After spending more than a decade designing and building space stations and rockets, Budarin, like a sports writer who’s grown tired of watching other people play the game, had decided that he’d like to try his own hand at living in one of his creations. Between 1989 and 1991, he attended classes at Star City’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and, after passing the state examination, was qualified as a test cosmonaut. It took two more years of training before he was qualified to fly Soyuz. He also prepared for a visit to Mir.
His first stay was a relatively short one, from June until September 1995, but long enough for him to complete three successful space walks and enjoy a luxurious flight on the space shuttle, the first time a Russian cosmonaut had hitched a ride on it to Mir. (After Budarin was safely delivered by Atlantis, Norman Thagard took his seat on the return to earth.) His second stay, the one that he shared with Andy Thomas, was even more notable. He spent the first seven months of 1998 in space and, during that time, completed six space walks, helping to repair Spektr’s damaged solar panels and earning high enough praise from the ground to become a Hero of Russia.
He had also become a favorite of the Americans. In the halls of Star City, he was quiet and serene, if a little serious; he liked to fish and to ski, and when he was asked to name his favorite hobby, “picking mushrooms” was his usual answer. Happily, a man who can get along picking mushrooms had the perfect temperament for coping with the monotony of living in space. Whenever he was in orbit, Budarin was quick to laugh, the proverbial teddy bear, warm and gentle. It took a lot to ignite his temper, even when he was forced to spend most of his days on Mir repairing the tender machines that he had helped to build. He was the sort of man who whistled when he worked.
As a result, despite his poor command of English—he spoke it like Tarzan, mostly in two- or three-word sentences composed entirely of nouns and verbs—Budarin made for pleasant company.
Charles Precourt, the pilot of Budarin’s first shuttle mission, recalled a preflight drive from Houston to Galveston, Texas, when the two men spent forty-five minutes passing a Russian-English dictionary between them. Muddling through a halting conversation, he and Budarin still forged something like a friendship on their way to the Gulf Coast. During that otherwise unremarkable drive, over causeways and through swamps, Budarin, especially, discovered the joys of communicating by means other than words. Contrary to what he had been taught as a child growing up in stone-faced Russia, he learned the power of a smile. He came to understand that so long as he said whatever he was trying to say with a light in his eyes, he had no fear of his message being lost in translation.
He and Andy Thomas (whose Russian was only slightly better than Budarin’s English) didn’t often “speak” to each other during their months together in space. But along with Mir’s amiable commander, Talgat Musabayev, the two men made a habit of eating dinner together and taking comfort in each other’s company, even if it was only in a calming silence. When something really needed to be said, wild gesturing became the official language of Mir, usually punctuated with laughter after the men realized how ridiculous they sometimes looked.
Fortunately, because they both spoke German, Musabayev and Thomas were able to have real conversations, most often away from Budarin, so that he wouldn’t feel left out. Over Thomas’s litany of scientific experiments, they would tell each other war stories, and, in time, they found plenty of common ground talking about music and art and what they missed about home. Those bonds proved important over the course of the coming weeks, when Mir struggled through a few more of its mishaps, including sweltering temperatures and a small, contained fire that pushed carbon dioxide levels dangerously high. Almost laughably, the first of Budarin’s and Musabayev’s planned space walks to repair Spektr was scrubbed when they couldn’t open the airlock’s hatch, one problem compounding another.
Budarin had bent or broken three wrenches trying to crack the hatch’s code before he gave up. That kind of persistence, coupled with his surprising lightheartedness throughout the episode—after heading back inside, he had looked at Thomas with a smile and a shrug as if to say, “Shit happens”—was what most impressed the Australian about him. Here was this man who boasted a Russian’s stoic calm coupled with the backslapping familiarity of an American. It was a rare combination, especially for a cosmonaut, and especially on the troublesome Mir. Nikolai Budarin was, in a lot of ways, the perfect space sidekick. He was the best of both worlds.
· · ·
At first, the International Space Station appeared to be built out of the worst of them. The newly forged relationship between Russia and the United States got off to a rocky start when the Americans put pressure on their new colleagues to de-orbit Mir. Trying to keep it aloft, well past its expected drop-dead date, was proving a distraction in getting the new station off the ground. But for the Russians, losing Mir was like losing a limb. There would be a phantom itch when it was gone.
Though they were cash-strapped and knew, in their sheltered hearts, that it was time to say goodbye, they resisted letting go until December 1999. The announcement was made with the solemnity of a eulogy. Deaf to that farewell, a new consortium, MirCorp, tried to find a way to rescue the station with private money. There were also last-ditch political fights to save it, with the Communists desperate to keep this last great Red Star in the sky.
But inevitably, an unmanned Progress was dispatched to Mir in the winter of 2001, more than fifteen years after the station’s first module had been launched. The Progress docked, and like a tugboat, its rockets were used to push Mir closer and closer to the eart
h’s unwelcoming atmosphere. Its time in orbit finally ended on March 23, 2001, when the station lit up like a funeral pyre before its surviving fragments splashed down into the South Pacific. There were tears in Moscow and among the 107 men and women who had lost one of their more memorable homes.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that having been born during Mir’s controversial demise, the International Space Station sometimes seemed a bad seed.
Almost from the beginning, the Russians had fallen behind on their funding commitments and, more important, on their module construction. Although Mir had given them the inspiration for a host of design improvements—they sought to add lights and sensors to aid in docking, provide quick disconnects for the cables that ran through open hatches, and reroute cooling lines and electrical cables to prevent moisture buildups and leaks—they seemed to lack the will to turn their lessons into hardware.
Zarya, the station’s first building block, was launched late, in November 1998, not long after Budarin had returned from Mir, as though in some cosmic way he had become the weight on a pulley. Two weeks later, the shuttle Endeavour launched with the first American module—tiny, coral-colored Unity—on board. Ground control tried to plaster over the cracks that had formed in the new partnership, pouring out good feeling while watching the shuttle climb into the sky: “We have booster ignition and liftoff! The space shuttle Endeavour with the first American element of the International Space Station, uniting our efforts in space to achieve our common goals.”