by Jay Chladek
The cosmonauts referred to the canisters as “candles,” and the duty of activating them typically fell to a flight engineer, in this case Lazutkin. The apparatus that housed an activated canister was located in Kvant 1. A few days after the new crew arrived, the old crew decided to have a party for their new crewmates on 24 February 1997. As Lazutkin described it, they opened and consumed some of the comfort foods, such as red caviar, normally only reserved for very special occasions due to the cost. During dinner, a warning light indicating low oxygen turned on, so it was time to activate a canister. Lazutkin excused himself to do so, as he had done several times on the mission already. He switched out the spent canister for a fresh one and activated it by pulling its activator pin.
When an SFOG canister is operating properly, it feels slightly warm to the touch due to the heating element, and a breeze of “fresh” oxygen can be sensed. But this time, the canister literally almost exploded, as a blowtorch-like flame measuring about a foot across and two to three feet long erupted from the canister. Flames in zero gravity normally form a ball, but this one was straight, like a rocket’s exhaust plume. The fire was being fed by freshly generated oxygen under pressure. Molten droplets of metal from the burning canister were splattering on the far bulkhead according to Linenger’s accounts of the fire. It was like a fireworks display gone horribly wrong.
Dense smoke began to fill Mir as the crews reached for their emergency oxygen respirators. The first one Linenger reached for didn’t work, but the second one did. Lazutkin, in an interview for a television program about Mir, described what happened next: “When I saw [Mir] was full of smoke, my natural reaction was to want to open a window. And then I was truly afraid for the first time. You can’t escape the smoke. You can’t just open a window to ventilate the room.”
After an attempt to smother the blaze with a blanket had little effect, Korzun grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to put it out with the foam setting, but the foam didn’t do much good. He switched to water to cool the fire area down. This was critical since if the fire didn’t get under control, the flame might breach the far wall of the Kvant module and open it to space, killing everyone in the process. Linenger acted as part of the firefighting team, stabilizing Korzun by the waist as the cosmonaut worked to spray water on the fire. Linenger checked Korzun periodically with tugs on the legs to make sure he was still conscious, since he couldn’t see his friend easily in the dense smoke or hear him through the sound of the inferno and the respirator mask. With each tug, Korzun would move his legs to acknowledge he was still conscious.
At the same time, Kaleri switched off the circulation fans and began printing out critical orbit data and checklists in the Mir base block that would be needed to help undock and deorbit the Soyuz modules if the station had to be abandoned. The three newcomers did whatever they could to support the firefighting crew by grabbing more extinguishers and making preparations in the Soyuz that was still accessible. The fire raging in Kvant 1 meant that half the crew would be unable to get to their spacecraft until the fire was put out, as the passageway to the second Soyuz was completely blocked by the flame.
At least three extinguishers were used on the fire, and Linenger has said that they didn’t really make a dent in it. But they helped to prevent secondary fires from braking out. A few weeks earlier, Kvant 1 was packed with full trash bags before they were all loaded into a Progress module and jettisoned to make ready for the next Soyuz. If the trash bags had still been present, they would have easily caught fire.
Finally, after what seemed like too long of a time, the fire was out. But the crew was still in danger, as they still had a station filled with smoke. Energia claimed that Mir’s air-purification systems made short work of the smoke, but the crew on board was pretty sure that it was the damp conditions and cold metal that absorbed the smoke. The crew tried to do as little activity as they could for the next hour, attempting to let their emergency respirators last as long as possible while the smoke cleared. After about an hour, Korzun removed his respirator first and felt that the air was breathable enough. Accounts of how long the fire burned vary between who was asked, as officially the Russians say it only lasted about ninety seconds, while Jerry Linenger has said it burned for closer to fourteen minutes. While flight controllers on the ground downplayed to the media and to NASA the whole situation and just how dangerous it was, everyone in orbit knew that they had dodged a serious bullet. At least the crew got to share a laugh as everyone complimented Kaleri on how calm he was, doing orderly printouts of critical data while chaos was going on around him.
As to what caused the fire, nobody is really certain, since the oxygen canister was almost completely destroyed. The likely cause is that the heating element somehow got contaminated by an organic compound, such as oil residue, probably during its manufacture. Flight controllers at TsUP initially accused Lazutkin of contaminating the canister himself, but those accusations were ultimately dismissed. For a while, though, the crew was forbidden from activating any canisters from the same production batch. Ultimately, they had to do so when supplies ran low, and no problems developed with any of the other canisters. When Korzun, Kaleri, and Ewald returned home on Soyuz TM-24, the strain on Mir’s systems was reduced, and things returned to normal for the remaining three crewmembers.
Other Problems
While things got back to a “normal” routine after the fire, Mir was certainly not quite the same vessel that had been launched eleven years earlier. Frequent leaks were developing in the station’s ethylene glycol coolant loops, and droplets of the green fluid could sometimes be found floating free in the cabin. On past stations, a glycol leak would have resulted in abandonment of the station, but the TsUP was seemingly doing everything it could to keep the station manned and going at all costs. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were spending much of their time trying to look for and plug coolant fluid leaks in the maze of pipes located behind equipment panels in Mir’s base block and Kvant 1 modules.
Ethylene glycol, the same stuff used in automobile radiator systems, can cause lethal kidney damage if ingested, and nobody exactly knew what breathing glycol fumes would do to the crew on board. Linenger described that whenever a coolant line was pressurized with air to look for a leak, his nose would immediately get stuffed up and he would begin to cough, even if he was on the other side of the station. Russian flight controllers again downplayed the concerns much to the frustration of the crew on orbit, and Linenger did his best as a trained medical doctor to periodically check his crewmates for signs of lingering glycol effects regardless of what the TsUP controllers were saying.
That wasn’t the only problem, as the station’s guidance computer was also shutting down periodically. When that happened, Mir would drift out of alignment, and its solar arrays would no longer get efficient light from the sun. On one occasion, not enough systems were shut down before the batteries on Mir drained and the station was plunged into darkness. When it happened, it took hours to realign the station manually to generate power and days before the batteries were charged enough to resume normal operations.
Near Miss
During a normal docking with Mir, the Kurs rendezvous-and-docking system would handle the whole process. As a backup to the Kurs system on the Progress modules, Mir was outfitted with a remote control station known as TORU (a Russian acronym meaning “Tele-operated Mode of [Spacecraft] Control”). It featured a CRT display screen and a control panel with two control sticks. It would allow a cosmonaut to take over control of a Progress module and dock it manually like a Soyuz if a problem developed with the Kurs. However, the Russians had more ambitious plans for TORU.
On the ground a crisis was brewing. The Kurs system was manufactured not in Russia but rather in the Ukraine by the Kiev Radio Factory. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, Ukraine became an independent country and formed its own space agency, which continued to manufacture the Kurs system for the Russians, but for a price. While Russia struggled through its economic pr
oblems, the price of the Kurs had gone up to the point that Energia began to look for alternatives. Officials felt that if cosmonauts aboard Mir could fly the rendezvous-and-docking sequence of a Progress with TORU manually, Russia would not have to buy the Kurs system anymore. Therefore, they could fit the Progress with a simpler system to supply range and rate data for docking and load it with more cargo.
While a close-proximity docking test had taken place with TORU before, Tsibliyev as command cosmonaut would perform a much more ambitious test with it. Progress M-33 arrived in early February, containing fresh supplies. Progress equipment is not loosely loaded on board. Instead, it is hard bolted and strapped into a web truss structure to prevent shifting during thruster burns, and it had to be loaded in a certain way so as not to upset the craft’s center of mass. Linenger recalled how his crew would begin to stow equipment on an outgoing Progress based on a manifest radioed up from the ground. Then, new orders would be issued by TsUP requiring the crew to remove things in order to stick in additional equipment during a very time-consuming process. While the weight of each piece of equipment was accounted for at launch, there was no effective way to weigh the trash and spent equipment in zero gravity. So no one knew exactly how much stuff was loaded into a Progress before jettisoning it.
The attempt to dock manually was made on 4 March as the Progress, which had been undocked a week prior, was commanded by the ground to begin a burn that would send it back to the station. The plan was deceptively simple. When the craft was in range, Tsibliyev would receive a black-and-white television feed from the Progress via the TORU, along with range and rate data from its Kurs system to judge the ship’s distance from the station; then he would fire the braking rockets on the Progress to slow it down and guide it in for a docking. Everything would take place in orbit with no help from the ground, since the station was out of communications range after the Progress rendezvous burn command was sent.
Problems began almost immediately. At the appointed time, the Progress was not transmitting a television picture. Linenger and Lazutkin tried to look for the craft from Mir’s portholes, but that was easier said than done, as the craft was coming in at an angle from which they couldn’t easily see it. As minutes ticked by, the concerns grew among the crew as they still had no television signal or a visual in the portholes.
Finally Lazutkin spotted it coming in way faster than it should have. He tried to instruct his commander in what direction to send the craft, but that didn’t work too well. Without a common point of reference of whether the craft was right side up or upside down in addition to a reversed perspective, up, down, left, and right might be very different. Unable to get a television picture, Tsibliyev began moving to the portholes, looking for the Progress himself. When he saw it, he immediately moved back to TORU and fired the translation thrusters in a last-ditch attempt to force the Progress to miss, as it appeared to be on a collision course. Everyone braced for an inevitable collision. When it didn’t come, everyone let out a sigh of relief. They had literally dodged a bullet as the Progress went sailing on by.
At the time of the attempted docking, the Russians downplayed the danger to NASA, saying that it was “routine” and had been done before. No one in Houston had any idea of just how dangerous it was. One of the mission control rooms in Houston was set up with a reduced staff to monitor the docking. But apparently controllers at TsUP had told them the docking attempt had already been made, so the U.S. controllers called it a night. No attempts were made by NASA to examine the “docking test” further.
One last milestone on Linenger’s mission involved a space walk he performed with Tsibliyev to fit some experiment modules to the outside of Mir. It was the first time an American astronaut had performed a space walk in a Russian Orlan suit. For Linenger, this would be his first space walk; although he had trained in the Hydrolab at Star City, he had not conducted any similar training in Houston’s own facilities. The space walk went well, although Linenger felt an almost-overwhelming sense of falling when he was positioned on Mir’s Strela crane arm, and it took all his concentration to overcome a sense of fear and near panic from his subconscious. Prior to that space walk, no other astronauts had admitted to having similar fears, but some came forward afterward to express that they had encountered the same thing when perched on very high vantage points, outside the relative safety of the shuttle’s cargo bay.
At the end of Linenger’s nearly five months in orbit, he was very ready to come home and expressed his feelings to managers in private emails that he didn’t think Mir was safe for astronauts to occupy due to its almost-constant need for repairs. But he still managed to finish all his science and photography goals. Given that he didn’t seem to bond with the crew according to Tsibliyev’s and Lazutkin’s accounts in Dragonfly, it seems that his crewmates were as ready to get rid of Linenger as he was to leave the station. Linenger paints a bit of a different picture in his own account, saying that while he didn’t work hand in hand with the crew on certain repair tasks (ones that only a single person could best do anyway), he still made himself available to conduct some of the Russian research by changing out materials experiments in the furnaces to give his crewmates time to devote to the repairs to Mir’s glycol systems, which they were best equipped to deal with in the first place. Ultimately, after returning home and fully recovering from his long-term spaceflight, Linenger was asked if he wanted to fly another mission. He declined the offer, as he felt that his time on Mir was enough and left the astronaut corps soon after.
Michael Foale’s Mission
On 17 May 1997 Atlantis arrived on mission STS-84 to exchange Linenger with Michael Foale. Foale was born in Louth, England, to an English father and an American mother, which gave him dual citizenship in both countries. Foale wanted to become an astronaut since an early age and learned to fly planes on his own time in addition to his schooling as an astrophysicist. Foale began working for NASA upon joining the Mission Operations Directorate in 1983, but he wasn’t accepted to the astronaut corps until 1987.
The language training and acclimation efforts in Russia paid off, as by all accounts, Foale was a team player with the Russian crews he flew with. They treated one another as equals and got along together rather well compared to some of the things Tsibliyev and Lazutkin continued to say about Linenger after his departure. Given the stress that the cosmonauts were under with the coolant leaks and the near miss by the Progress, not to mention the general state of decay that Mir’s systems were experiencing, the comments were likely more intended as a form of blowing off steam as opposed to being genuine criticisms centered on their former astronaut crewmate.
About a month into Foale’s mission, plans were made at the TsUP to try another TORU docking with Progress M-34. As before, NASA wasn’t in the loop on this decision; while Linenger had likely mentioned M-33’s near collision in debriefings, efforts were slow on the part of NASA managers to look into things. While Tsibliyev expressed some concerns about trying another docking to his crewmates, he was still a proud military pilot, and a successful docking meant that he would get an additional docking bonus added to his paycheck. Russian cosmonauts would get bonuses of about one thousand dollars each if they performed special tasks such as EVAs or achieved successes on dockings. Indeed, it has been said that some cosmonauts would override the Kurs system on Soyuz dockings with Mir just so they could get an extra grand for an “unscheduled” docking. In a post-Soviet-era Russia, where a cosmonaut made a fraction of what NASA astronauts typically did, every little bit helped.
While it was unrelated to the TORU docking attempts, Tsibliyev had a close call on a previous mission. On 14 January 1994 at the conclusion of a standard five-month tour, Tsibliyev, Aleksandr Serebrov, and French CNES research cosmonaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré undocked Soyuz TM-17 in preparation to come home. Before the crew left Mir’s vicinity, controllers on the ground wanted them to station keep with the Kristall module and take photographs of the APAS docking collar, which Soyuz TM-16
had previously used. Tsibliyev was handling the controls of the Soyuz from the descent module while Serebrov was in the orbital module preparing to take the photographs.
Tsibliyev reported that the Soyuz was handling sluggishly. The hand controller that governed acceleration and braking was not working. He still had some control with the second stick, which he used to keep the Soyuz from colliding with Mir’s solar arrays. Ten minutes after undocking, Soyuz TM-17 had a glancing collision with the Kristall module near its attachment point with the base block, but there was no real damage. It turns out that somebody had not set a switch properly in the Soyuz orbital module, which has a duplicate set of control sticks. Because the orbital module’s acceleration and braking controller was activated, it locked out the one Tsibliyev was using in the descent module. Everyone considered the incident “no harm, no foul,” and Tsibliyev was not punished. Little did anyone realize three years and five months later what was about to happen.
Russian controllers had analyzed the data from the previous aborted TORU docking attempt and determined that the radar signal from the Kurs had jammed the television picture. So for this attempt, there would be no radar data coming from the Progress to tell its velocity or distance. Tsibliyev would only have the Progress television feed and a grid scale on the TORU monitor to help judge how far out from Mir it was during the approach.