by Jay Chladek
Lazutkin also set up a camera to record the docking and had it focused on the TORU station. As before, ground controllers sent instructions to the Progress to begin its approach, before the station drifted out of range of the ground stations. At the proper time, Mir got a good camera signal from the Progress. The station looked tiny on the monitor as clouds and ocean drifted underneath the station. The Progress was coming in from above the complex and slightly behind it. Mir itself in relation to Earth was upside down, with Kvant 2 pointed down toward the surface and Spektr pointed upward. The plan was for the Progress to dock with Mir’s Kvant 1 docking port.
Michael Foale in a television interview for NOVA picked up the story from there: “I had no idea what they were doing. No one at NASA knew what the Russians were doing. I’m still thinking everything is normal, because nobody has told me anything about what systems were turned off or on.”
The picture in the TORU monitor was not the greatest since the low-contrast, black-and-white image meant that the station was about the same color as the clouds below it. The plan was for Lazutkin and Foale to try to acquire the Progress visually in a porthole and use hand-held laser range finders to provide a more accurate measure of distance, but they couldn’t see it in order to do so.
The Progress was coming in very fast, and attempts by Tsibliyev to fire the braking thrusters were not working. If anything, the ship almost appeared to speed up a little bit. Lazutkin finally saw it out the bottom porthole of the Mir base block, which was pointed up toward space: “Through the porthole, I could see the cargo ship gliding below us.” Lazutkin stood erect, looked toward Foale, and shouted, “Michael, va korabyl!” (korabyl is Russian for “spacecraft”), which essentially meant, “Get to the Soyuz!” Michael Foale got up from his spot next to Tsibliyev and floated at a high speed toward the front of Mir, since he understood something bad was about to happen. Tsibliyev tried one last-ditch attempt to fire the Progress’s translation thrusters to try to have it miss Mir.
The Progress, which had slowed down somewhat but had not stopped, filled Lazutkin’s porthole. The craft’s front was visible, with its nose slightly angled toward the rear of the station as it approached. It looked almost like a train coming to a railroad crossing with Mir stuck on the tracks. Lazutkin described it in similar terms: “It was full of menace, like a shark. I watched this black body, covered in spots, sliding past below me. I looked closer and at that point, there was a great thump and the whole station shook.” There were actually at least two thumps. The orbital module of the Progress collided with Mir’s base block at an angle, which was fortunate since that part of the Progress was a smooth ball with no sharp protrusions. The Progress bounced off and sideways before a back corner of its propulsion section collided with the Spektr module near its centrally mounted solar arrays, tearing a jagged hole in one of them.
The decompression alarms went off, indicating that there was a leak in the station. Initially Foale thought that the source of the leak was in the base block, since that is where the Progress had impacted first, but Lazutkin had seen the Progress hit the Spektr module and correctly guessed that the leak was coming from there. It was a slow leak, which gave them time to try isolating it before abandoning the station. Tsibliyev monitored the pressure drop from his command station while Lazutkin and Foale worked to unhook cables between Spektr and the base block. Pressure was steadily dropping when Mir came back into communications range and controllers at the TsUP were informed of what happened.
One last power cable frustrated Lazutkin since he couldn’t find its plug, and he began trying to cut it with a kitchen knife. Sparks erupted from the cable, and Foale indicated it was not a good idea to do that. Eventually the two men traced the cable to its source and unplugged it. By this time, the pressure differential was producing suction, and they were unable to close Spektr’s hatch since it had to be pulled shut against the airflow. Finally, the pair got ahold of one of the hatch plug assemblies Mir had been equipped with when it launched, and they positioned that in the hatchway, sealing off Spektr and the leak successfully.
42. Visible damage to Spektr after the Progress collision. Courtesy NASA.
But their ordeal was not over yet. The Progress collision and the leak had knocked Mir into free drift and a slow spin, so the remaining solar arrays stopped tracking the sun. The low-voltage alarms came on as Mir slowly lost power and the interior was plunged into darkness. Foale recalled, “For the first time I experienced a totally silent, still space station, where there are no fans moving, there is no light on, nothing is alive. Just our breathing is causing any sound.” Eventually, it was Foale who came up with an idea to stabilize Mir’s attitude. Using the Soyuz, the crew would fire its thrusters to arrest Mir’s slow spin and then orient it properly so that its solar arrays could begin the process of recharging the batteries. With Spektr isolated, power would be at more of a premium, given that the four newest solar arrays (one of them damaged) were now useless in a dead module.
After a few days of steady recovery, during some housecleaning to remove some of the clutter and stow cables that were no longer hooked to Spektr, Lazutkin accidentally unplugged the power cord to Mir’s main computer, and the station drifted out of alignment again, plunging it into darkness as the batteries drained. Again the crew had to work to restabilize everything and recover systems during the next few days. It was not a promising future for the station or NASA’s involvement. Foale’s experiments and personal effects, including his laptop computer, were inside the dead Spektr module. But in the days following the collision, there wasn’t much time to do scientific work anyway.
The stress caused to the crew during the collision and its aftermath took a heavy mental toll on them. Reportedly, Lazutkin apparently made the decision to commit suicide ten days after the collision, likely because of the second power loss caused by unplugging the wrong power cable on top of everything else. But ultimately, he changed his mind and went back to work after having a chance to sleep on it.
Aftermath of the Mir Collision
Back on Earth, all parties involved with the program, especially on the NASA side, were shocked at how the events transpired to allow such a collision to occur in the first place. It seems that a double standard in safety had evolved where although NASA maintained a very tight reign on hardware and procedures they directly controlled, they pretty much just took Russia’s word for granted regarding Mir’s condition. The safety oversight was not there, since NASA-built hardware wasn’t involved and since most of the work in Houston was concentrating on the ISS. Energia, on the other hand, seemed to treat their “partners” like little more than customers who had almost no say in how things were done on Mir, except for when a shuttle would dock.
In the wake of what happened in June of 1997, plus the events that transpired on Jerry Linenger’s Mir stay, there were a lot of calls for NASA to abandon the Mir program on the justification of safety alone. Congress held hearings, while interviews of participants were conducted to find out what had happened. Linenger had become a very vocal critic, saying that the next astronaut to fly after Michael Foale should not be allowed to stay on the station due to the danger involved.
In the weeks after the incident, Tsibliyev and Foale were scheduled to conduct an internal space walk. The crew would depressurize the station and enter Spektr, where they would retrieve some of Foale’s personal belongings and route the module’s power cables through an airtight hatch plug. They would also try to find the air leak and patch it. However, doctors on the ground detected that Tsibliyev had developed an irregular heartbeat, likely due to all the stress related to the mission; so the ground control decided to delay the first of the repair space walks until after the next crew had arrived. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin returned home after cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov arrived in early August.
It would be up to the two newcomers to try to salvage the station. Returning Spektr’s solar arrays to the electrical grid was the most important ta
sk. Priroda had no solar arrays of its own and needed the power that Spektr’s arrays provided if any semblance of a science mission were to be salvaged. Solovyev was up to the task as he had already performed space walks on previous missions. Along with normal EVA space walks, the internal space walk was successful in returning Spektr’s solar arrays to Mir’s power grid, and Michael Foale was able to resume a scientific program with equipment in Priroda.
Over the course of their five-month stay in orbit, Solovyev and Vinogradov accomplished many of the repair goals. While Spektr was lost, the rest of the station seemed stable enough. Michael Foale even conducted a space walk with Solovyev and also provided invaluable experience when the station’s attitude-control computer dropped off-line a couple of more times. The crew this time was able to shut off enough critical systems before the ground told them to do so, preventing another complete power failure from occurring.
Back home, NASA made the decision to continue the Shuttle-Mir Program, provided the station could be given a clean bill of health. In spite of all the criticism, justification was made that unplanned repair tasks might occur on future missions to the planets when an escape was not possible, so the experience was potentially invaluable. To many observers, it seemed like tenuous justification, at best, with NASA dodging accusations that it was ignoring its own safety protocols. However, NASA knew that even though they were about a year or two away from the first module of the ISS flying into orbit, pulling out from the Mir program at that time might cause Russian involvement in the ISS to crumble like a house of cards.
There were improvements in the dialog among NASA, Roscosmos, and Energia after the collision. NASA was able to flex its muscle in getting the Russians to delay a visit by Léopold Eyharts to the station on the Soyuz TM-25 flight with Solovyev and Vinogradov until after the more critical problems had been dealt with. The Russians wanted to fly the French mission since they needed the money. But they also needed support from shuttle’s heavy-lift capability to send up new equipment and more supplies. So at this point, the partnership was finally becoming a two-way street, with both teams working together as opposed to the Russians dictating the terms to the Americans. The Russians began to discuss their problems more openly, and concessions were made to the Americans. In exchange, NASA allowed the Russians to save face.
The Final Shuttle-Mir Missions
There would be a change as to which astronaut would next visit Mir, since that person needed to be capable of conducting a space walk if the need arose. Wendy Lawrence, the next astronaut scheduled to fly to Mir, was too small to fit in the Orlan suit and hadn’t trained for a space walk, so the decision was made to replace her with Dave Wolf, who had EVA experience. This meant that Andy Thomas, originally scheduled to be a nonflying backup, would serve the last tour of duty on Mir. Dave Wolf, also being a bit of an inventor and multitasker with a medical degree and an engineering background, seemed perfect for the assignment in helping to get the NASA-Mir science program back on track. Some of the equipment used on Mir was of his own design.
Arriving on the station during STS-86, Dave Wolf seemed to have a good attitude for his mission. He had to get used to the Russian way of doing things as well when his crewmates didn’t hand out praise or a simple “thank you” as easily as Americans do. Wolf also had to cram a lot of training with an Orlan suit into a five-week period, since although he was EVA qualified in an EMU, there were initially no plans for an American to conduct an Orlan EVA on Mir after Linenger’s mission. Dave Wolf was up to the task, though, and relished it. On orbit at the end of a space walk that he conducted with Anatoly Solovyev, the veteran of sixteen space walks told him, “Good job,” and Dave felt that it was all worth it. He was a fully accepted member of the team.
Unfortunately, nothing could be done to repressurize the Spektr module. Attempts were made to pump air through it from a sealed canister with a tracer material to highlight the leak, but the cosmonauts were unable to find the source. A special cap fitting was delivered on STS-86 by cosmonaut Vladimir Titov and astronaut Scott Parazynski during an EVA, the first conducted by a Russian in an EMU suit. This cap was installed around Spektr’s damaged solar array during a Mir space walk to try to seal a possible leak in that location, but it didn’t work either. Except for the module’s reconnected solar arrays and the equipment salvaged from it, Spektr was a dead and useless module.
At the end of Dave Wolf’s mission, the space shuttle Endeavour moved to dock with Mir on STS-89. On board, Australian-born astronaut Andy Thomas was ready to conduct the final American stay on Mir. Like Dave Wolf, he took steps to bond with his crew as much as possible. One benefit of Thomas’s training was that he did not have to visit the Defense Language Institute to learn Russian. Instead, he had access to a very good tutor at JSC as preparations were underway to offer Russian-language classes for astronauts and support engineers closer to home before they had to make trips to Russia for ISS missions.
While there were the usual mechanical breakdowns and problems with Mir’s systems, Andy Thomas’s stay on the station was relatively uneventful. Solovyov and Vinogradov returned home not long after he arrived, and the Mir EO-25 crew of Talgat Musabayev and Nikolai Budarin took over. French research astronaut Léopold Eyharts also conducted his delayed short visit to Mir to continue France’s research program, and he returned to Earth with the previous Russian crew.
But there was one more incident that reminded everyone involved as to just how dangerous spaceflight can be. Mir’s carbon dioxide scrubbers used a chemical bed of charcoal, and periodically that bed needed to be changed out for a second one. To purify the used bed, its sealed tray would be opened to space and heated to red-hot conditions to bake it clean for reuse. During one particular baking session, the valves weren’t configured right, so the red-hot charcoal bed was still open to Mir’s internal atmosphere and caught fire, pumping dense smoke and carbon monoxide into the cabin before corrective action was taken. Andy took readings with a carbon monoxide detector and reported his findings to the ground, but controllers dismissed the readings as being suspect since they were awfully high. Thomas also collected an air sample. When the sample was analyzed after he returned to Earth, scientists at JSC were shocked as to how high the carbon monoxide readings were. All Andy Thomas could do in the days after the fire was to take medication for his carbon monoxide–induced headache while the air quality improved, and he suffered no lingering effects from the incident.
On 4 June 1998 the space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-91 docked to bring Andy Thomas home. This would also be the final docking between Mir and a shuttle. After four days of supply transfers, the two craft separated. When Discovery landed on 12 June 1998, ISS Phase One was officially concluded.
As NASA’s administrator Daniel Goldin predicted, NASA had learned a lot about space station operations from the Russians and certainly more than they ever wanted to. The Russians, on the other hand, learned a lot about their American counterparts. They learned enough to know that astronauts were as capable of hard work as their own cosmonauts. While the relationship between the two countries’ space agencies wasn’t always a harmonious one, it was still productive and delivered results. Even though the political and economic situation would throw a few curve balls at the partnership in the coming years, the agencies were finally ready to commence construction of the International Space Station.
11
The International Space Station
Five months after Andy Thomas returned home from the last NASA mission to Mir, the next phase of space station development was ready to get underway. On 20 November 1998 a Proton rocket launched into orbit carrying the first element of the ISS. It was an FGB node, based on Chelomei’s TKS spacecraft design. Prior to the flight, it was given the name Zarya (a Russian word meaning “Sunrise”). It seemed like a very fitting name since it was, for both the United States and Russia, the sunrise of a new project. To space workers with experience in the Salyut program, the name of this first mod
ule likely gave them a sense of pride. Three decades after a space station with Zarya painted on the side flew as the first Salyut, a direct descendant would finally take the name officially into orbit.
A total of eighteen member nations were involved with the International Space Station project, spread across five major space agencies. NASA and Roscosmos were the highest-profile members of the project, but the ESA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan would also be heavily involved in development of hardware and providing crewmembers for the station. In terms of on-orbit construction projects, the ISS was massive and would require close coordination among all involved. During the next few years, over 150 space walks would be carried out in direct support of ISS assembly tasks.
Russia’s modules would provide the backbone for the station in the form of the Russian Service Module (RSM). The RSM started life as DOS-8, the engineering backup module for the Mir station. It was originally planned to become the Mir 2 space station before the collapse of the Soviet Union. From here, a three-person crew would begin regular occupancy of a module that at a glance didn’t look all that much different from the previous DOS stations. Andy Thomas visited the RSM on one of the early shuttle missions to the ISS and said he had a sense of déjà vu as to how much it looked like Mir on the inside in terms of its equipment layout.
But just because the RSM looked like Mir on the inside, that doesn’t mean it was a totally off-the-shelf design. Thanks to the lessons learned from Mir’s time in space, extensive changes were made in regards to how the station’s systems were set up. Some problems with Mir revolved around how its modules were hooked together for power and the glycol coolant loops. Critical time due to the leak was spent in unhooking hoses and power lines between Spektr and the Mir base block after the Progress collision. A future depressurization event on the ISS might prove to be even more time critical, so every attempt was made in the RSM’s redesign to move coolant lines and power hookups to outside the pressurized areas so that a hatch could be sealed off at a moment’s notice.