The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  By Korzun’s count, they had used nine oxygen masks. Nine remained. Donning another six masks would leave only three. Russian guidelines mandate that the crew can remain on board only if there is at least one mask per crew member. If they got to another round, at least part of the crew would be forced to evacuate.

  They decided to conserve the air in the masks as long as possible. Korzun ordered everyone to be quiet and still in an effort to save oxygen. The smoke was thinnest in Kvant 2, so everyone but Korzun gathered there. Linenger set up a first aid station, laid out tracheal tubes and a portable ventilator, and gave each crew member a thorough examination. By 2:00 all the oxygen masks had run out, and Linenger dispensed white 3M surgical masks for everyone to wear. The smoke had left a layer of grime throughout much of the station, and the crew spent most of the next two hours wiping and cleaning every surface. Around four, when everyone gathered in base block for the upcoming comm pass, Linenger dispensed soap packets he had prepared. Everyone washed up, then changed clothes and handed their T-shirts and shorts to Linenger, who stuffed them in a bag.

  At 4:16 am the comm pass began: “We can hear you well.”

  “Our situation is as follows,” Korzun began. He was floating in base block with everyone else. “Everything has been normalized. The smoke has disappeared. It still smells of burning. The crew is wearing masks that prevent harmful gases from penetrating. Medical examination of the crew has been conducted: pressure, pulse, lungs. The crew’s condition is normal. The oxygen pressure is one five five. In the future we will use canisters. We will use the [second SFOG] in base block, which is in reserve. We will observe the security measures while turning it on. But maybe you have some recommendations in terms of using it. Now Vasya will speak about the condition of anti-fire devices on board, and we will answer all the questions you are interested in.”

  “Okay, Valera,” the TsUP replied. “Do you think that the crew feels satisfactory?”

  “Yes, their condition is good. There have been no injuries. Everybody feels good. We don’t [need to] waste any time with that. The doctor has conducted a full examination. Everything is under control.”

  “Also, we would like to receive from you the exact time and location of the fire.”

  “22:35 was the beginning of the fire,” Korzun explained. “The canister got on fire approximately one minute after the installation. Sasha Lazutkin controlled the activation. But the fire was so big and active that even the use of the fire extinguisher did not have practically any effect in the initial stage. It’s good it was there. We used three fire extinguishers during the fire. And two were still left prepared for the future.”

  “Vasily Vasilyvich, go ahead,” the TsUP said.

  “We used five fire extinguishers,” reported Tsibliyev, “out of which three were used completely, and two were prepared. Now five of them are still left in the complex. Nine oxygen masks were used.”

  “Okay” the TsUP replied. “How do you estimate the possibility of another fire now?”

  “Right now it’s [fine],” said Korzun. “But the reason why we asked for recommendations on canisters is because we don’t understand the reaction. The fact is, there was some uncontrolled reaction during burning. The body of the canister was burned. And even the metal was melting on the circular closing device. The temperature was that high. Now, of course, while turning it on we will use fire extinguishers that are ready And if there is any sign of a fire we will use extinguishers in the foam mode.”

  “Guys, we haven’t looked at this question from this point of view,” the TsUP replied. “Up until now you don’t use canisters until a special order is given.”

  “Right,” said Korzun. “Here’s what Sasha thinks. If the new canisters were stored on Earth for a long time, maybe it’s better to use old ones that were stored in conditions of weightlessness.”

  “What is the serial number? We have old canisters that were stored on board a long time.”

  Sasha Kaleri broke in. “No, we don’t understand the reaction. Maybe it’s some kind of redistribution of the density of the charge, or something like that. We have to look into the history of the storage.”

  “Okay, we’ve got that. Did we understand you correctly that the old one, the one that was stored a long time, got on fire?”

  “Well,” says Kaleri, “they were from a container that’s in [Kvant]. Behind the panels.” He read off some serial numbers.

  Korzun cut in. “Guys, we also have a question on the chemistry of this substance. It didn’t burn to the end, because water was put on it. Does it mean that there are no toxins there? And what happens when you put water on it?”

  One of the senior Russian doctors, Igor Goncharov, get on comm. “Guys, we will give you the precise information on toxins later. And here’s another thing. Please put on masks by all means.”

  “We’re using masks,” says Korzun.

  “Now dairy products are recommended. Take more milk and curds.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You can take vitaron. Two capsules.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can also [take] carbolen. If you have headache symptoms and so on.”

  The doctors congratulated Korzun and the entire crew for a job well done and urged them to sleep. Everyone tried. No one slept soundly.

  The Soyuz which had brought MIR 23 was docked at the node. During the fire, the crew of MIR 22 had been cut off from their escape craft which was docked at the Kvant.

  The fire had happened while they were out of communication – Linenger thought it lasted about 14 minutes; TsUP said it was a “microfire” which had only lasted 90 seconds.

  Twelve hours later they were still wearing their 3M masks.

  The near miss

  On 4 March the supply vessel Progress M-33 was due. The Progress had been described as an eight-ton bumblebee with two solar arrays like wings. Tsibliyev manned the TORU with the Kurs radar providing information about the Progress’s range and speed. Ground control released the Progress 7km away from Mir; at the speed it was moving it would take 15 minutes to get to Mir. Linenger was watching from Kristall. When the Progress was 5km away the camera on board should have activated but it failed to give a picture. Tsibliyev remembered:

  It was the most uncomfortable [time]. I felt as if I was sitting in a car, but I couldn’t see anything from the car, and I knew there was this huge truck out there bearing down on me. You don’t know if it’s going to hit you or miss you. It’s like a torpedo, and you’re in a sub.

  “Where is it?” Tsibliyev began asking the others. “Do you see it yet?”

  “No,” said Lazutkin, peering out the big base block window behind the commander.

  “No, nothing,” Linenger said over the intercom. There are three windows in Kristall, and he was floating between all three, scanning space for any sign of the Progress.

  They waited.

  “Do you see it?” Tsibliyev shouted a few moments later.

  “No, I don’t see it,” Linenger breathed over the intercom. Lazutkin, floating at the base block window, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  Several moments passed.

  “Do you see it?” Tsibliyev asked again.

  “I don’t see anything,” Linenger replied, hurriedly shuttling between his portals.

  Static filled the Sony monitor. Linenger could tell from the tone of Tsibliyev’s voice the Russian was growing anxious. More time went by. Somewhere out there a fully loaded spaceship was bearing down on them.

  “Where is it?” Tsibliyev demanded. He turned to Lazutkin. “What should I do?”

  Lazutkin had no advice.

  They waited.

  At the two-minute point, Tsibliyev began to sweat.

  “Do you see it?” he shouted again.

  “No, I don’t see it,” Linenger said. Lazutkin concurred. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Find it!” Tsibliyev ordered. “Find it!”

  After several more moments, during which he flo
ated back and forth between Kristall’s three portals peering into the inky blackness of space, Linenger heard Lazutkin’s voice over the intercom. It was filled with tension.

  “Jerry, get back in base block quick,” he said.

  Lazutkin had spotted the Progress. Until this point Mir’s massive solar arrays had blocked his line of sight. But now he saw the ship approaching fast, slightly below the station. From his vantage point in base block, it appeared to be heading for an imminent collision.

  “I see it!” Lazutkin said.

  “Where is it?” Tsibliyev asked.

  “It’s close!” Lazutkin replied.

  This was as technical as Lazutkin’s response got. He remembered later: “I saw it in full size. All the solar arrays, the antennae, everything. That’s when I told Jerry to go to Soyuz.”

  Linenger propelled himself down the length of Kristall as quickly as he could. Reaching the node, he saw Tsibliyev sitting at the console, jerking at the TORU joysticks. The Sony monitor still showed nothing but snow.

  “What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted.

  Lazutkin turned to Linenger. “Get in the spacecraft,” he said quickly. “Get ready to evacuate.”

  As Linenger turned, he saw Tsibliyev furiously manipulating the TORU joysticks. He realized the Russian was attempting to fly Progress blind. Swiftly, Linenger folded himself into the Soyuz capsule and immediately began pulling out the various cables and ventilation tubes that connected the craft to Mir. Floating up into the node, he saw Tsibliyev still in base block, sitting before the monitor. He appeared to be on the verge of panic.

  “What’s it doing?” the Russian shouted.

  Lazutkin’s reply was unclear. Crouched at the mouth of the Soyuz, grabbing and disconnecting cables as fast as he could, Linenger glanced over his shoulder to see Tsibliyev jump back from the console and check the portal himself. Then he sprang back to the monitor and pulled at the black joysticks once more.

  “What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted at Lazutkin.

  At TsUP the NASA ground team were watching the picture from the camera on board the Progress.

  Tony Sang and his team crowded around the monitors in the NASA suite to watch Tsibliyev redock the Progress. Sang wasn’t especially worried about the maneuver. From conversations with Viktor Blagov he understood – incorrectly – that the Russians had handled these kinds of long-distance manual dockings on several previous occasions with no problem.

  In front of him, Sang’s monitor showed video being shot by the camera aboard Progress M-33. Gone were the overlaying targeting sights that they normally would see; the sights had been unavailable since communication with the Altair Satellite was cut off. Still, the moment the image from Progress flickered onto his monitor, Sang realized something was amiss.

  “This doesn’t look right,” he said.

  The screen should show Mir floating in space as the Progress approached. Instead the monitor in NASA’s office showed Earth in the distance. There was no sign of the station.

  “This doesn’t look like any Progress docking I’ve seen before,” Sang mused aloud.

  As the minutes tick by, Sang and his group kept waiting for Mir to come into view.

  “Where is it?” someone said.

  After about ten minutes, with no sighting of Mir, the picture winked out. Several moments after that, as Mir once again came into range of a Russian ground station. Tsibliyev’s voice came over the comm. Sang and Tom Marshburn watched intently as one of their interpreters, a temporary replacement they didn’t know well, busily scribbled down what the commander was saying. As usual they had no sense of the words or even the tone of the cosmonaut’s message.

  “The commander is really excited,” the interpreter said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Marshburn.

  “I don’t know, but he’s really, really excited,” the interpreter replied. “Something’s going on.”

  New to the job, and to the technical terms Tsibliyev was using, the replacement interpreter was unable to decipher precisely what had happened. Sang realized Tsibliyev was angrily complaining about some kind of malfunction on his screen; apparently it wasn’t working. Curious, Sang and Marshburn hustled down to the floor to find out what was going on.

  The Progress missed.

  Barely fifteen seconds before impact, as Linenger scrunched himself into the Soyuz to prepare for emergency evacuation, Tsibliyev’s screen suddenly activated, and he realized the Progress would not hit the station. The screen, broadcasting from the camera aboard the Progress, showed Mir uncomfortably large and close. But from this vantage point Tsibliyev saw the Progress would pass underneath the station, narrowly avoiding a collision.

  Crouching by the base block window, Lazutkin watched the ship sail by harmlessly. He guessed the distance at two hundred meters or less.

  Emerging into the node, Linenger saw Tsibliyev dramatically sag in relief. All the pent-up energy in the commander’s shoulders seemed to drain from his body as he leant heavily on the TORU controls. For the longest time no one said anything.

  Tony Sang’s interpreter was right. Tsibliyev was angry.

  “I will repeat,” the commander said at the beginning of the pass. “We watched it visually . . . There was no picture for a long time. At 10:19 it appeared . . . It started moving away, under us. We were close to it. We were like 200, 220 meters close to it, judging by its size . . . We managed to apply the brakes. The speed was around two meters [per second], and then it started moving away very fast. And that’s the last thing that we saw. Now there is no picture again . . . We couldn’t observe anything for a long time. There was no picture.”

  Vladimir Solovyov himself got on the comm. “Did you have control of it?”

  “I started braking and switching off the angle mechanisms. It passed by at a very high speed. It wasn’t possible to see where to go. I touched the handles intuitively. We didn’t collide with . . . There was no picture. And there is no picture now. And it’s hard to say how to control it. Only when we started braking, a picture appeared.”

  For the moment, the TsUP was primarily concerned with locating the errant spacecraft. “[It’s] somewhere underneath,” the comm officer said.

  “But I don’t have anything,” Tsibliyev said. “Nothing can be seen. Just the mist.”

  “Read from the screen,” the comm officer suggested.

  “I can’t see anything anyway,” Tsibliyev snapped. “It’s not us. We saw through the window that it started moving to the side of [base block].”

  The rest of the comm pass was spent attempting to find the Progress. After signing off, Tsibliyev turned to Linenger and Lazutkin and launched into a lengthy tirade directed at the TsUP’s incompetence: “Jerry, what was I supposed to do? What could I do? The screen shows nothing! Nothing! What could I do?” It took a while for thecommander to settledown, andwhen hedid he heaved a long sigh.

  “Guys,” he said, “I never want to do that again.”

  Lazutkin was sent to the Elektron unit which generated their oxygen supply – there were two but one was not working as there was an air bubble blocking its electrolysis canal. Consequently he had to use their remaining Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator and had to insert the same type of cylinder which had burst into flame. It took six attempts to get the cylinder to engage but it did not catch fire.

  On 2 April there was a malfunction in the station’s coolant system. TsUP detected a drop in pressure in the pipe carrying coolant to the Vozdukh CO2 removal system, the second leak of this type.

  It was getting very hot in the Kvant 2 module so TsUP sent commands to reorient the station to keep the the Kvant 2 module out of direct sunlight. Unfortunately the reorientation put the base block in direct sunlight causing the temperature to rise to 90°. They found the corroded joint which was leaking in Kvant near the docking assembly. The coolant was a type of anti-freeze which gave off toxic fumes so they had to switch off the CO2 removal system to reach the leaking joint. Linenger refused t
o help with repairs or cleaning up operations. The Russian psychologist at Ground Control, “Steve” Bogdashevsky, was concerned that the two Russians were becoming exhausted and stressed:

  “We were first alarmed by the fire. Usually it takes a year or more to fully relieve the stress after something like this. It’s scary, and you could see it. The fear was in them. It really changes a person’s behavior. They became more cautious. They didn’t feel as relaxed. We started picking up nuances we didn’t pick up before. They became more demanding to the ground. For instance, [if] Vasily had a question the ground said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And they became irritated. After the failed docking, it became clear to us that the psychological state of the cosmonauts was becoming worse. I wrote a paper with an unfavorable psychological prognosis, and I called for everybody’s attention to change their attitude toward the crew. But the attitude remained the same. The attitude can be characterized as a sweat-sucking system. [The TsUP] just makes them work harder and harder.”

  Bogdashevsky’s first warnings to the TsUP came in a report written on March 23. His preliminary diagnosis for both Tsibliyev and Lazutkin was exhaustion. Further, he felt Tsibliyev was suffering from something he called “ostheno-neurotic syndrome,” a related condition. “When a person is osthetic,” Bogdashevsky explains, “he gets tired faster and gets irritated. It depends on the person, the mind. One person can get depressed. Another person, his blood pressure changes. It depends.” In Tsibliyev’s case, it had led to increasing irritation, both at the ground and at Linenger.

  Linenger’s EVA “just out there dangling”

  Linenger and Tsibliyev were scheduled to do an EVA together, the purpose of which was to set up a piece of equipment called the Optical Properties Monitor (OPM) on the end of the Kristall module. The OPM was the size of a suitcase. Considerable friction had built up between Linenger and Tsibliyev which affected their preparation. As part of their preparation astronauts and cosmonauts usually discussed what they were going to do in detail. Linenger and Tsibliyev didn’t.