by Jay Chladek
Shuttle Docking
The space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on 27 June on shuttle mission STS-71. In its payload bay, it was fitted with the pressurized Spacelab module and the APAS-89 docking adaptor. The Spacelab would be used to conduct joint American and Russian life sciences experiments both while docked to Mir and after undocking. Joining the five-person American crew were Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev on his fourth spaceflight and Nikolai Budarin on his first. Both men would swap places with the Mir EO-18 crew of Dezhurov, Strekalov, and Thagard.
The EO-18 crew had transferred Kristall back to Mir’s front docking port to provide Atlantis enough clearance from the solar arrays on Mir’s base block for a safe docking. Mir would temporarily stretch almost thirty meters in length from the aft docking port on the Kvant 1 to the APAS docking port at the extreme opposite end of Kristall. After the shuttle departed, Kristall would be moved back to make room for Soyuz and Progress craft.
Docking day for STS-71 came on 29 June. At the controls were veteran shuttle commander Robert “Hoot” Gibson and pilot Charlie Precourt. At 08:00 Houston time, Atlantis achieved a soft dock with Mir as the pair orbited over central Russia. By all accounts, it was a very smooth docking with almost no misalignment issues to speak of or any jolt during the actual linkup. Once hard dock was achieved, the pair formed the largest combined spacecraft in orbit, weighing almost half a million pounds in the process. After a few hours, when the seal checks showed that everything was satisfactory, the hatches were opened, and Gibson shook hands with cosmonaut Dezhurov, paying homage to a similar handshake conducted on ASTP between Stafford and Leonov.
For the next five days, the combined ten-person crew conducted transfer of materials between Mir and the shuttle as well as joint experiments in Spacelab to measure the crew’s adaptation to space. Logistically, the shuttle could carry many more supplies than a Progress module, and its fuel cells also came in handy for delivery of fresh water to Mir’s tanks. The shuttle’s ability to haul supplies during the coming years would be very important for Mir’s continued use.
To take advantage of a rare photo opportunity at the end of the five-day period, Solovyev and Budarin boarded the Soyuz and undocked from Mir, taking up position several meters to the left of the complex in order to shoot photographs of the two docked spacecraft. Once Atlantis had undocked, the Soyuz would redock with the station once again. Unfortunately, Mir’s attitude-control computer picked this time to go off-line, so Solovyev and Budarin had to redock manually as soon as possible to stabilize the station’s attitude before the solar arrays stopped tracking the sun and the batteries began to drain. This incident would be a hint of things to come.
After a few more days of solo operations, Atlantis was ready to deorbit and land. Since Dezhurov, Strekalov, and Thagard had spent over one hundred days in orbit and shuttle crews normally sit upright during reentry, there were concerns about the long-duration crewmembers being prone to blackouts from the g-forces caused by blood pooling in their legs. To help ease the strain on their bodies, Atlantis was fitted with three reclined crew couches on the middeck. The crewmembers coming from Mir would sit with their backs on the floor and their legs elevated in a similar position to Soyuz seats so that their hearts were at the same level as their heads. This seating arrangement would become standard for crewmembers of Mir and the ISS when returning to earth on the shuttle. Atlantis landed successfully at KSC on 7 July. Thagard survived his ordeal none the worse for wear, as did the cosmonauts. The Americans and the Russians hailed the entire mission publicly as a success, and the way was cleared for the next missions to Mir by U.S. astronauts.
The next visit of a shuttle to Mir occurred on 15 November 1995. For this mission, the shuttle carried a new Russian-built docking module for Mir. This barrel-shaped module was equipped with APAS-89 docking collars on each end with a cylindrical section in the middle. On orbit, the module was attached to the shuttle’s airlock; upon undocking, the module would remain attached to Mir. This allowed for future shuttles to dock with the Kristall module at its normal location since the new module provided the proper clearance between the shuttle and Mir’s solar arrays. The docking module also contained two new solar arrays that would be installed on the station’s Kvant 1 module during two planned EVAs.
40. Space shuttle Atlantis docked with Mir on STS-71. This image was taken by Solovyev and Budarin aboard Soyuz TM-21. Courtesy NASA.
No crewmembers were exchanged on this mission, as the purpose of this flight was to load the station with additional supplies. The mission was a short one by shuttle standards, as Atlantis was only docked to Mir for four days out of the eight it spent in orbit. One of the crewmembers on this flight was Chris Hadfield, a mission specialist from the Canadian Space Agency. Chris became the only Canadian astronaut to visit Mir.
Shannon Lucid’s Mission
It would be about a year after Thagard’s launch before the next American would call Mir home. Astronaut Shannon Lucid was part of the first group of women to join the NASA astronaut ranks in 1978. Her mission would be the first of a continuous American presence on Mir for the next two years. While Lucid’s flight was packed with experiments, many of which were originally intended for use on Thagard’s mission, some problems with scheduling of the training meant that Lucid didn’t have access to any decent documentation for the science she would be performing until very close to launch time. Fortunately, Lucid had one of the better support groups of the ISS Phase One program, as Bill Gerstenmaier, an engineer from NASA’s Mission Operations Directorate, was the primary lead and did what was necessary to get her all the support she needed. Many consider Lucid’s increment with Mir to be one of the smoothest running of the entire Shuttle-Mir Program.
When the space shuttle Atlantis arrived on 24 March 1996 during mission STS-76, Lucid’s cosmonaut crewmates, Yuri Onufriyenko and Yuri Usachev, had already been aboard Mir for over a month, after arriving aboard Soyuz TM-23. The combined crews transferred 1,500 pounds of water to the station and two tons of additional equipment and supplies. A highlight of the mission was an EVA in which shuttle astronauts Michael Clifford and Linda Goodwin conducted a six-hour space walk and placed four racks of materials known as the Mir Environmental Effects Payload (MEEP) on the docking module. These racks were exposed to space to evaluate materials being considered for use on the ISS. It was the first time American astronauts had performed a space walk around a Russian station. The samples were retrieved during an EVA on STS-86 almost eighteen months later.
After five days of joint operations, Atlantis undocked and left Lucid to begin what was originally planned to be a mission lasting four and a half months. Ultimately, due to a couple of delays in processing Atlantis for the STS-79 mission stemming from concerns about the SRBs, Shannon Lucid would end up spending 188 days in space and setting a new single-mission endurance record for both American and female astronauts. There were some concerns prior to the flight as to how her Russian crewmates might treat her. But Onufriyenko and Usachev reportedly acted like gentlemen, calling their new crewmate “Ms. Shannon,” and the trio got along very well together.
Priroda’s Arrival
Mir’s final module, Priroda launched on 23 April 1996. Unlike the other Mir modules, it was not equipped with solar arrays. Instead, it was outfitted with a large load of storage batteries to provide electricity until it could be docked with the station. Three days later, the new module approached Mir’s docking port. During those three days, a problem with one of Priroda’s electrical connectors cut its available power supply in half. So Priroda would only have enough power to perform one docking attempt. This was not a good development, as most of the other Mir modules failed to dock on their first attempt. But Priroda performed a successful docking on Mir’s front port and was moved to the vacant axial docking port soon after with no problems. Mir was now complete, and the complex measured 27.5 meters tall and 31 meters across, weighing almost 130 metric tons.
41. The complete Mir complex. The radial modules (clockwise from the upper left) are Kvant 2, Priroda, Spektr, and Kristall with shuttle docking module. A Soyuz is docked in front, and a Progress is docked to Kvant 1 in back. Courtesy NASA.
Priroda’s primary scientific load was for studies of Earth’s atmosphere and surface features, using a combination of microwave systems and infrared-detection equipment that measured the near, the passive, and the active infrared spectrum. It also contained a lidar that could be used to measure cloud-top heights in Earth’s atmosphere. Priroda’s most visible feature was a large parabolic antenna for a synthetic aperture radar system called Travers. Similar radar systems had been flown on shuttle flights, but this was the first time such a system had been designed for Mir. All told, twelve countries supplied experiments for use on Priroda, making Mir a true international space station. Much of the science from European countries would take place in Priroda, while most of the American work would be conducted in Spektr.
Onufriyenko and Usachev conducted a total of six EVAs during their five-month stay on Mir. Much of the work revolved around preparing Kvant 1 to receive its two new solar arrays brought up with the shuttle-docking module. They also manually deployed the Travers radar antenna after it had failed to fully unfurl during its automatic deployment sequence. On one space walk, the pair also performed a rather unusual role in an advertising gimmick as they unfurled and inflated a giant Pepsi-Cola can and filmed it for use in a commercial that ultimately never aired. It was yet another use of Mir by Energia to generate revenue from product endorsements to help offset the station’s operating costs.
Due to the delays in Shannon Lucid’s return shuttle mission, the next Russian crew arrived at Mir before the shuttle did, as cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Aleksandr “Sasha” Kaleri arrived aboard Soyuz TM-24 in mid-August. Joining them was France’s first female astronaut, Claudie André-Deshays, who conducted a short-duration mission to the station during the crew handover period as part of a series of joint Russian and French experiments. Onufriyenko, Usachev, and André-Deshays returned to Earth aboard Soyuz TM-23 safely on 2 September.
John Blaha’s Mission
STS-79 finally got off the ground on 16 September 1996 and docked with Mir a couple of days later. Shannon Lucid was very happy to see her NASA colleagues, as she was seen floating alone in Mir’s docking compartment while awaiting the hatches to be opened between the two spacecraft. After nearly five days of joint operations, Lucid returned home aboard Atlantis while her replacement, John Blaha, took up residence for his own four-and-a-half-month tour of duty aboard the station.
As a veteran shuttle commander, John Blaha was unique among the NASA crewmembers in the Mir program, since every other astronaut in the Mir program was a mission specialist. Blaha came up through the test pilot ranks in the U.S. Air Force and was one of the last graduates of Edwards AFB’s ARPS program before it was eliminated from the Test Pilots School’s curriculum. By all indications, Blaha was a very smart individual. It comes as a bit of a surprise that Blaha’s time on Mir as documented in the book Dragonfly seems to paint a picture of an astronaut that didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of what he was doing on board. In an interview conducted after Dragonfly was published, Blaha considers the sections written about him to be a work of fiction done at his expense to sell books.
Part of Blaha’s problems seemed to stem from an overly ambitious scientific program that was tightly scheduled on a daily basis by a support crew that seemed to not have a firm grasp of the equipment on orbit or the state of Mir’s systems. The daily schedules, known as “Form 24s,” were sent up to the station on a regular basis and had the astronaut’s entire day mapped out from wake-up to sleep period. The updates might call for Blaha to work with one specific piece of scientific apparatus with a specific time to perform the experiment, but the schedules didn’t take into account that Blaha would have to likely spend hours collecting pieces stored all over Mir and assembling them to perform an experiment. In a couple of cases, specific pieces of equipment couldn’t be found at all.
These schedules had been agreed to ahead of time between NASA and flight directors at the TsUP and couldn’t be amended easily after their approval. So if an experiment wasn’t conducted for some reason, it might pop up on the schedule again in a few days, starting the whole time-wasting process all over again. The usual result typically was frustration between Blaha on orbit and his American support crew on the ground.
Blaha also apparently clashed a little bit with Mir commander Valery Korzun, an air force officer who joined the cosmonaut ranks as a test pilot. Korzun was flying his first space mission and apparently tried to compensate for his relative lack of space experience by micromanaging everything. Blaha, being a career U.S. Air Force officer with command experience, didn’t seem to appreciate that, and the two apparently butted heads on a few occasions. Of all the cosmonauts, Korzun was considered to be the most Westernized of the group, and he typically got along well with his astronaut counterparts. The fact that Blaha and Korzun didn’t train together likely contributed to the problems. Korzun’s crew was originally the backup to the prime crew of Gennadi Manakov and Pavel Vinogradov. When Manakov developed heart problems and had to retire from the cosmonaut ranks, Korzun and Kaleri were assigned to fly instead. In contrast to Blaha, Jerry Linenger seemed to get along very well with Korzun, as they had trained together.
When Jerry Linenger arrived on Mir aboard Atlantis on STS-81 in early January of 1997, Blaha seemed to be rather exhausted and glad to be returning home. Blaha explained to Linenger many things, including his frustration with the scheduling. Linenger tried his best to make the transition a smooth one. At the time, nobody really had any idea what the next five months would have in store for the most junior astronaut in NASA’s Mir program.
Jerry Linenger’s “Eventful” Mission
Jerry Linenger hadn’t been an astronaut very long when he was selected to take part in the Shuttle-Mir Program. Linenger had been a medical doctor with a bachelor’s degree in bioscience and a U.S. Navy flight surgeon, and his desire to take part in a long-duration space mission is one of the factors that led to his astronaut selection in 1992. To get spaceflight experience prior to his trip to Mir, Linenger flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery on STS-64 in 1994.
It has been said that in every story of actual events told by two people, there are three versions: what one person said, what the other person said, and the truth. Jerry Linenger’s mission to Mir has been documented in print both in Dragonfly and in his autobiography, Off the Planet. Both have similarities, but they also paint rather different pictures of some events. What they have in common is that Linenger experienced some of the same frustrations that Blaha did, at least in the early days. Linenger was also irritated that scheduled time periods where he was supposed to be in contact with his support crew on the ground or having personal communications with his wife (who worked for one of the NASA contractors in Russia) were usually interrupted by official business considered to be more pressing by the TsUP flight controllers. Even Linenger’s cosmonaut crewmates found this irritating since they knew that voice time scheduled for personal matters was not something that was usually interrupted since it was considered important for crew morale.
Eventually, Linenger opted to cut off all voice communications with his support team except during very important periods, preferring instead to just use the email system on his laptop computer, since he considered the communications likely to get interrupted anyway. To the Russian doctors and psychologists on the ground, this painted a picture that Linenger was not being a team player and that there was possible strife on orbit between the American and his Russian colleagues. Linenger’s own account denies that was ever the case.
Fire in Space!
The communications and psychological concerns didn’t really begin to manifest themselves all that much, though, during the first month of the mission. Indeed, Korzun pulled rank on the American support team
at one point on Linenger’s behalf when he noticed how they were scheduling the astronaut, front-loading him with a lot of scientific work at a fast pace as if it were a shuttle mission. Experienced cosmonauts knew that long-term spaceflight was a marathon, not a sprint. Trying to do too much too soon risked hitting the wall and burning out. The support team backed off.
On 12 February 1997 Soyuz TM-25 docked to Mir with crewmembers Vasily Tsibliyev and Aleksandr “Sasha” Lazutkin on board. Joining them was German physicist Dr. Reinhold Ewald, who would be conducting a ten-day scientific program during the handover. Ewald would return home with Korzun and Kaleri. Having six crewmembers on board meant that Mir’s life-support systems were a bit overtaxed. Of the two primary Elektron oxygen-generating systems located in Mir’s base block and Kvant 1, only one was working and not at full efficiency. During docked shuttle operations, the shuttle would carry the life-support load for both itself and Mir. But without the shuttle, something else was needed to generate the required oxygen for six people.
Mir’s supplemental oxygen generation came in the form of canisters known to the Russians as Vika (a Russian term meaning “Pressure” or “Power”) and to NASA as SFOG (solid-fuel oxygen generation). Each Vika canister contains a quantity of lithium perchlorate and an internal heating element. When the heating element is activated, it heats up to four hundred degrees Celsius, and the resulting chemical reaction releases fresh oxygen. It is a very efficient system, given its compact size; the Russians also use them in submarines. One canister can provide enough oxygen for one person for twenty-four hours. With more than three people on Mir, a canister needed to be activated every few hours.