The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  Cosmonaut experiences a leak in his spacesuit

  On 22 August they began the IVA. Burrough:

  In the node, Foale helped Solovyov and Vinogradov into their suits, which were difficult to close without help. Then he swam through the adjoining hatch into the Soyuz. Behind him he locked down the hatch between the Soyuz and the node, then retreated into the command capsule itself and locked down the hatch between the command capsule and the Soyuz’s small living compartment. If for some reason the two cosmonauts were unable to repressurize the node after the EVA, they would be forced to depressurize the Soyuz living compartment, at which point they would enter the Soyuz and evacuate the station. Foale had his own reentry suit ready just in case.

  Hovering inside the node in their spacesuits, the two Russians got the go-ahead from the ground to begin depressurizing.

  Everything was finally going as planned. Then, suddenly, at 1:23, just as the pressure reached 210 millimeters of mercury, Vinogradov felt something move inside the left arm of his suit, something feathery and light brushing against his inner forearm. With a start he realized it was air. There was a leak in his suit.

  Vinogradov said on open comm: “I started moving my hand and the pressure is going down [in] my suit. When I move, I feel the air is moving.”

  Foale was the first to react. “Pavel, stop!” he blurted through his headset. “Stop moving your hand!”

  “Stop, stop moving your hand!” Anatoli Solovyov chimed in.

  On the TsUP floor, Vladimir Solovyov and his ground controllers exchanged worried looks. “Pavel, don’t move your hand,” Solovyov said calmly.

  If Vinogradov moved his hand enough to loosen the glove, all the air in his suit could be sucked out in a matter of minutes. Vladimir Solovyov took several moments to confer with Blagov and the others. As they talked, Foale was struck by Vinogradov’s reaction. “He wasn’t scared by it,” Foale remembered, “but I sure was. I was as worried as I’ve ever been during spaceflight.”

  Vinogradov was in fact as frightened as he had been in his life, but he struggled not to show it. He realized the leak was somewhere in the fitting between his glove and his spacesuit. Fighting to remain calm, he took his right hand and grasped his left wrist firmly, trying to staunch the flow of air from his suit. Behind him, Solovyov urged him to stay calm. Even with his glove clamped shut, Vinogradov believed air was still leaking from his suit. He estimated he had about fifteen minutes of air inside his suit.

  “Pay attention!” Vladimir Solovyov barked after a moment. “This is very serious.”

  This Vinogradov did not need to hear. He knew it was serious.

  “Pasha, don’t worry,” Solovyov went on. “Don’t take any steps that are not well thought out . . . We have time.”

  Solovyov directed Vinogradov to close the star-shaped depress valve. The node was so small, the two men were pressed so tightly together, only Vinogradov could reach it. Awkwardly, he grabbed the valve with his left hand, all the while keeping his right hand clamped around his wrist. Slowly, he managed to crank the valve closed. The ground estimated it would take seven minutes for the air to stop seeping out of the node. Vinogradov hoped the air in his suit would last that long.

  Minutes ticked by. The repressurization valve was on Anatoli Solovyov’s side of the node, but the commander could not begin repressurizing the node until Vinogradov’s valve was completely closed. Vinogradov was quietly thankful his glove hadn’t opened further. “If my glove had opened completely,” he recalled months later, “I wouldn’t have been able to close that valve at all. Anatoli could not get to it. Only I could close it. I don’t even know what would have happened then.” But he did know: if the commander couldn’t find a way to close the valve, Vinogradov would suffocate.

  After seven minutes the pressure inside the node stabilized. Immediately the commander cranked the emergency repress valve, allowing air from base block to whistle into the node. With a loud hiss the pressure began rising. It took barely ninety seconds for it to climb back to 540.

  If they were to have any hope of completing the IVA today, Vladimir Solovyov knew, they must quickly replace Vinogradov’s leaking glove.

  “Pasha, do you have a spare glove?” Solovyov asked.

  Both cosmonauts had brought bags containing two spare gloves into the node with them. When the pressure reached 540, Vinogradov reached for his bag, took out his extra left glove, and quickly slid it on.

  “You turn it, pull it with all your proletarian might, and break it out a little,” Solovyov instructed. “Minimize the amount of time when your hand is bare.”

  It was 1:32. Vinogradov took two minutes to make sure the glove’s seal was tight. At 1:34 he announced that he was ready to continue. Vladimir Solovyov did a quick calculation to make sure that, with all the air they had used, there would be enough remaining to fully repressurize the node at the end of the IVA. According to his maths, there was.

  “Okay, then let’s start again,” Vladimir Solovyov said.

  Again Vinogradov took his left hand and turned the depress valve. The hiss of air filled their ears. In silence, the two cosmonauts waited as the atmosphere leaked back out into space. By 1:47 the pressure had fallen to 460. Five minutes later it was at 110. At 1:54 it had fallen to 50. Five minutes later, as the cosmonauts waited to enter vacuum, the station moved out of communications range with the ground. The men in the TsUP, with hundreds of reporters and cameramen clogging the mezzanine above them, would have to wait forty-five minutes for Mir to come back into range. In the meantime they could only hope there was not another unexpected problem.

  During the IVA they reconnected all the cables except the one which connected Spektr’s solar arrays to the main computer, which meant that Priroda and Kristall remained dark. They couldn’t find the hole either.

  On 6 September they made an EVA to find the hole. Burrough:

  Crouching inside his Orlan spacesuit in the air lock at the end of Kvant 2, Foale nervously eyed the hatch that led outside the station. Solovyov was right behind him, and at the commander’s urging, he gave the rusty hatch a shove. Apparently some air remained in the air lock, because the hatch sprang out forcefully, banging back onto its hinges. Hanging on to the hatch, Foale was jerked outside the station along with it.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  Regaining his composure, Foale quickly moved onto the ladder outside the station. Unlike Linenger, he felt no sensation of falling; Foale had walked in space aboard the shuttle and loved spacewalking. He and Solovyov had spent hours diagramming their work. Their six-hour spacewalk was fairly straightforward. They were to make their way to Spektr’s outer hull, check it for punctures, and construct handrails for later repair work. If they had time, they were to perform a minor repair on the Vozdukh system and retrieve a small radiation monitor.

  Foale, ignoring Linenger’s “razor-sharp” solar arrays, quickly made his way down the length of Kvant 2 and crawled onto base block, where he straddled the crane at the base of the Strela arm. Behind him Solovyov muscled out a large bag containing the scaffolding they were to assemble on Spektr. It took just over an hour for Solovyov to maneuver his way to the Strela arm, straddle its far end, and have Foale move him across open space to Spektr. At the Star City hydrolab, Foale had practiced using the Strela arm exactly once and wasn’t at all sure he could do what was needed; as it turned out, the crane proved easy to operate.

  Once at Spektr, Solovyov wasted no time. The TsUP had identified seven possible places the coin-size puncture might be located. Solovyov quickly took out a knife and began cutting through the foam insulation that covered portions of Spektr’s outer hull. For ninety minutes, while Foale waited at the Strela’s base, Solovyov methodically carved up the insulation near the impact area. The Mylar material kept fluffing up as he cut. “I should have taken scissors but not a knife,” he said at one point.

  It is, in fact, an impossible job, akin to finding a lost coin in a junk heap.

  After two hours Solo
vyov gave up. There was no hole, at least none he could see. “It is strange – to rumple this way and destroy nothing,” he said.

  A little before eight Foale shimmied down the Strela arm and joined the commander, who moved farther out on Spektr’s hull. He spent the last hour of the EVA manually rotating the three undamaged solar arrays to a position where they would more fully face the Sun. In this way the TsUP hoped to regain more power from the damaged module.

  By ten both men were back in the air lock. Solovyov’s hunt for the puncture had gone on so long they had no time to erect the scaffolding – which they left tethered outside Spektr – or work on the Vozdukh system. It was Foale’s job to close the outer hatch, and for some reason Vladimir Solovyov wanted him to work faster.

  “Hurry, Michael, hurry,” he said.

  But Foale sensed something was wrong. The hatch didn’t feel right when it closed.

  “Hurry,” he heard someone say.

  “Look, guys, you’re rushing me,” Foale said. “This does not feel right. I have to reopen the hatch and do this again.”

  Foale took an extra minute to make sure the hatch closed tightly, his sixth sense proving to be on target. It was the last time Mir’s outer hatch ever worked correctly.

  The computer crashed twice more before Foale left Mir in October.

  NASA administrator David Goldin confirmed that Phase One would continue.

  The last NASA astronaut to live aboard Mir was Andy Thomas, an Australian.

  John Glenn’s shuttle flight

  In 1995, John Glenn noticed an article which said that the effects of space aging were similar to those experienced by the elderly. Glenn had become a US senator and was serving his third term in office, representing his home state, Ohio. Despite this, he volunteered to be part of a research project on a shuttle flight. In 1998 he was a member of the crew of space shuttle flight STS-95 Discovery (October 29 to November 7). Glenn:

  The launch time was civilized by Project Mercury standards – 1400 hours. We awoke in crew quarters, suites that were an improvement over the bunk beds I remembered. Their walls had no windows, since shuttle schedules sometimes require crews to shift their normal wake-sleep routines in advance by way of artificial light, but outside we found the bright, clear morning that the meteorologist had predicted.

  We put on our crew-shirts for the traditional breakfast photo opportunity. I reprised my meal of steak and eggs with orange juice and toast. Looking around at what my fellow crew members had ordered, it seemed that steak and eggs had also become a launch day tradition.

  The atmosphere was businesslike as the launch approached. We were eager to get going.

  After breakfast, we went back to our rooms to tidy up. We also packed two small bags with basic clothing and personal effects, shoes, and a flight suit and toilet kit. One of them would be shipped across the Atlantic if we didn’t achieve full orbital speed or something else went wrong and we had to land at one of the TALS – transatlantic landing sites. There’s one in Spain, and another in Morocco. NASA would send the second bag out to Edwards Air Force Base in California, our alternative landing site, in case conditions weren’t right for landing at the Cape when we came down.

  Suiting up, each of us worked with the same small crew of suit technicians who had helped us during training. My crew was Jean Alexander, Carlos Gillis, and George Brittingham. We each sat in a big leather chair, and the suit techs hovered around us as if we were actors being made up for our stage appearance.

  Getting into the suit took forty-five minutes. I had to be something of a contortionist as I pulled on the special underwear rigged with cold-water tubes for cooling. It wasn’t easy at my age to get into the suit itself, either – feet first into the legs, then maneuvering to get my head and torso into it before the suit techs zipped it up the back. They fixed the gloves so they were pressure-tight, and fastened the helmet to the neck ring. When the visor was sealed, the entire contraption was pressure-tested to insure there were no leaks. Around the suit room, the crew looked like Poppin’ Fresh doughboys in bright orange.

  Then I loaded my pockets, one on each thigh and each shin, one on each shoulder. You have to know where your emergency radio and signalling equipment are – left-leg pocket. And your knife and other survival equipment – right-leg pocket. The rest of them held various tools and gear.

  Suited up, we headed toward the elevators, past the technicians and cooks and workers who had helped us throughout training. The suit techs followed, holding our helmets. This, too, was a trip I was familar with. But the expressions were different this time. When I took my walk from crew quarters on the day Friendship 7 was finally launched, I was going solo and it was a first flight. There was more uncertainty on the faces then.

  Still, there was the same silent acknowledgement that we were going to be riding a rocket that could kill us if anything went wrong. The ground team was there to say goodbye and wish us luck: their expressions said they were pulling for us. They wanted us to have a safe, trouble-free, and successful mission. The spirit of team-work and camaraderie was written on each face. It was as if their thoughts and wishes were going to be riding on that rocket, too, and none of us could have thanked them for everything they’d done.

  A pool of reporters and photographers watched behind the ropes as we walked from the elevators to the transfer van. I don’t think there was room for a single person more in the crowd. The atmosphere in the van was casual and jocular during the six-or seven-mile ride to the launch pad, though as I looked around at my crewmates I could see that we were getting ready to be serious. Then we reached the gate to the pad. The guard stepped into the van, and Curt said, “Launch passes, everybody.” The crew reached into the pockets on the left shoulders of their suits and pulled out small blue cards. I felt in my pocket, thinking somebody must have put mine there, but there was no card. Pedro was doing the same thing. Amid our fumbling. I was about to ask when the cards had been issued when I noticed that the rest of the crew – Shuttle veterans – were looking at us, rookies, trying to hide their grins. We had bitten, hook, line, and sinker. They all had a laugh, Pedro and I had our initiation rite, and the van proceeded toward the pad.

  At the pad, we walked back out along the ramp and looked up at the shuttle. That’s another launch day tradition, and it’s quite a sight.

  The space shuttle is the most complex machine ever made. It has two million parts, and a million of them move. Its wiring laid end to end would stretch 230 miles, and it has six hundred circuit breakers. The orbiter itself has three eighty-thousand-horsepower engines that each develop 393,800 pounds of thrust. They are fed by the huge rust-orange tank to which the orbiter and the boosters cling during launch, and the two solid-fuel rocket boosters each develop 3.3 million pounds of thrust. The weight at liftoff is about 4.5 million pounds, and total thrust at liftoff is over 7 million pounds.

  It was up there ready to go, and the liquid oxygen oxidizing the liquid hydrogen fuel venting out the top in wisps of vapor adds to the sense of drama. It’s a huge machine containing an almost unfathomable amount of power. That’s the point when it hits you. It’s for real – you’re going up.

  The elevator took us up. It was a beautiful day, and I paused to glance around at the Cape and the space complex that had changed so much since the time of Project Mercury. As I looked south to the Canaveral lighthouse, the Atlas and Titan launch gantries that are the remaining occupants of Heavy Row were reminders of the early days. Pad 14, where Friendship 7 and the rest of the Project Mercury Atlas flights had launched, was still there, but its gantry had been dismantled long ago. The blockhouse is a museum. It was hard to imagine that virtually the entire history of space travel had occurred between my first flight and my second. Somebody had pointed out that more time had passed between Friendship 7 and this Discovery mission than had passed between Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight and Friendship 7. It didn’t seem that long to me, but that is the way lives pass when you look back on them: in t
he blink of an eye.

  I don’t think anyone was scared. Apprehensive? Yes: I felt the same constructive apprehension I’d felt as a forty-year-old, keyed up and ready to go. Everybody knows something could go wrong, but you just put that behind you and go do what you’ve been trained to do.

  Chiaki had said that I ought to remember that in Japan, seven is a lucky number, and my age, double seven, was doubly lucky. That was a good way to look at it, too.

  I couldn’t have been happier that morning. This was about to be the culmination of a very long effort, both a chance to go up again after I thought that chance had been lost forever, and the beginning of a precious opportunity. I was a data point of one, but it was a start, and I saw the flight as the first step in a process that I hoped would lead to a new area of research that could eventually benefit tens of millions of people.

  Curt was the first into the spacecraft, and he climbed up to the flight deck, followed by Steve Lindsey and Pedro. I was next to last. No phone call from the gantry this time. Steve Robinson and Chiaki were already in their seats there on the mid-deck. They were being strapped in as I got there and Scott came in after me and went on to the flight deck.

  I hoisted myself into the seat by way of a strap hanging from the lockers overhead. Seated for launch between Chiaki and Steve, I was on my back with the wall of lockers less than three feet from my face.

  Launch was two and a half hours away as the strapping-in proceeded. The best thing to do is just lie there and let the technicians do the work. The seats aren’t the body-conforming contour couches of the early flights; they’re flat bench-type seats that are padded but not all that comfortable. The only way to adjust them is by pumping a bladder that provides lumbar support to your lower back. The early seats were designed to help us endure eight times the force of gravity, but a shuttle launch produces only three Gs.