by Chris Jones
By the galaxy’s two-star standards, Skylab’s crew enjoyed palatial surroundings. Unlike more modern stations, which have been modeled after factories, Skylab was a place for living, always more of a home than an office. There was a collection of sleep compartments tucked away in a quiet corner; a ward room with rows of food-storage lockers and chillers and a window for looking out on the earth; even a collapsible shower, the sort of decadence that Bowersox, Pettit, and Budarin did without on the International Space Station. A big vacant attic also offered Skylab’s crews a wide-open respite, perfect for whenever they needed some elbow room or felt like honing their zero-gravity acrobatics, just for kicks.
But such luxuries also betrayed a certain cultural weakness in the Americans. The fact was, and remains, that men born and raised in austere, cramped Muscovite apartments adapt more easily to living in austere, cramped space stations. The Soviets were harder. For instance, unlike astronauts, cosmonauts have always refused to wear diapers during flight. They would rather starve themselves in the days before liftoff and flush their pipes with an ice-water enema than get caught wearing a nappy. That hairy-assed triumph of the will, combined with a societal emphasis on the needs of the community over the desires of the individual—built on that old hammer-and-sickle platform of self-control and sacrifice—has served them well in space. Don’t forget, too, that a country in which smiling is viewed as a weakness has never had trouble finding men cold-souled enough to go months without hugs. First the Soviets, and now the Russians, have almost been bred to live year-round in personal winters.
The glad-handing Yankees, it seemed, not so much. After Skylab’s first crew made their safe return and its second—Alan Bean (Conrad’s crewmate on Apollo 12), Jack Lousma, and scientist Owen Garriott—spent an uneventful fifty-nine days in orbit, Skylab’s third and final crew put their finger on the seeming limits of American endurance.
On November 16, 1973, Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Ed Gibson lifted into space. They were all rookies, and the novelty of the place carried them through their first weeks. They took photographs of Comet Kohoutek, and Gibson profiled a solar flare, and they began what would eventually total more than twenty-two hours of near-perfect spacewalking.
But after the honeymoon, the breakdown began. They started to spar with the ground over a litany of complaints, from the poor quality of the towels to the awkward placement of the toilet, which too often turned morning dumps into hand-to-hand combat. The ground got cranky in turn, issuing a sharp reprimand when Pogue lost his lunch and Carr, instead of going by the book and bagging the puke for future analysis, flushed it. “We won’t mention the barf,” Carr said to Pogue, unaware that Mission Control had been listening in on the entire episode.
That rebellious streak exploded into full-blown mutiny toward the end of the crew’s sixth week in space. Complaining of overwork and a lack of cooperation from Houston—as well as those lousy goddamn towels—Carr, Pogue, and Gibson staged a distinctly un-American one-day strike. Though they eventually went back to work and spent eighty-four days in space, setting NASA’s latest endurance record, the crew’s legacy and the future of long-duration American spaceflight were left clouded. Before their return on February 8, 1974, the crew was told to boost Skylab into a higher orbit than usual. There, it would be left to hang as if from a string, powered down and dormant.
It stayed quiet for four years, until 1978, when it was revived from the ground just in time to chart its months-long fall to earth. NASA tried and failed to control its descent, and the public began taking a dim view of the nutbar scheme, nonplussed by the idea of space junk falling on their heads. Fortunately, when Skylab finally did make its fiery plunge on July 12, 1979, the only surviving fragments tore into empty patches of Australian desert.
Despite the program’s successes—a better understanding of the physical and psychological effects of calling space home, for starters—Skylab’s Chicken Little return saw it finish on a cracked note. NASA was left cornered by those memories, forced to turn its attention to the shuttle and quick dashes into space. The American endurance record set by Carr, Pogue, and Gibson would last for more than twenty years. Even then, it would take help from the Russians to break it.
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And yet, in a strange way, the Americans had first helped the Russians: by beating the scientists at Star City so plainly, in both conquering the moon and now turning their attention toward space, Houston’s technocrats had inadvertently freed their competition from the burdens of coming in first. It was as if some invisible pressure valve had been released, giving the Soviets the chance to catch their breath and redouble their efforts. They went back to work in a calm, calculated, and ultimately enviable way, without the artificial weight of deadline or the specter of shame. For the first time since Sputnik, they weren’t forced to race against the clock; instead, they concentrated their efforts on calendars.
The result was much-needed success, foreshadowing the greater glories that were to come. Salyut 3 and Salyut 4 were both slipped easily into orbit and visited by five different crews through 1974 and 1975. (Each did, however, experience at least one link-up failure.) With every launch came important advances. Cosmonauts became better prepared for the physical and psychological demands of long-duration flight. Their vessels were also made more ready; Soviet engineers brainstormed their way toward a kind of inventor’s immortality, their gifts still giving today. Among other things, they devised an air lock to jettison trash, a water purifier that recycled moisture collected out of the air, a zero-gravity exercise bike, and a small vegetable garden called Oasis. The developments allowed Salyut 4’s final visitors, Pyotr Klimuk and Vitali Sevastyanov, to spend sixty-three days in space—battling a green-mold epidemic and humidity high enough to fog their windows, but also nearing the endurance record set by Skylab’s rowdy last crew. They had come close enough, in fact, to pull the Soviets back to even, close enough for the gap to be bridged in the most palpable way.
Like all thaws, the melt that finally pooled the American and Soviet space programs was a slow one. Its first trickles, surprisingly enough, came in the days before the space race kicked off in earnest. During his inaugural address in 1961, President John F. Kennedy advocated a shared journey into space: “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars.” Come the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, the Tet Offensive, and 100-megaton nuclear tests, terror became the lead horse. Mercury and Vostok became stunt doubles for Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev; Gemini and Voskhod stood in for Lyndon B. Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev.
Victory ended the battle. It helped that the winner was gracious. Along with the flag and a patch to commemorate the lives of the Apollo 1 astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind a pair of medallions in tribute to Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin in the moon dust. Komarov died in April 1967, when the first Soviet Apollo, Soyuz 1, hurtled to earth, its parachute lines tangled. Gagarin, the first man in space, had died in a mysterious jet fighter crash in March 1968. In such tragedy, there was unity. The patch and medallions were like the finishing touches on a sad song for which both sides had written verses.
Three years later, they were brought that much closer together by a thin document held in a plain blue binder. Signed by Brezhnev and Richard Nixon during the first American-Soviet summit in May 1972, the agreement spelled out the shared desire to witness astronauts and cosmonauts shaking hands in space within thirty-six months.
Only slightly behind schedule, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project saw a once impossible dream come true. On July 15, 1975, Soyuz 19, carrying Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov, blasted off from the formerly invisible Baikonur Cosmodrome. A little more than seven hours later, Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand lifted off in their Apollo capsule. The two ships would soon become one, albeit in an ungainly embrace, looking a little like two insects joined at the head.
As unpretty as it would look, that union represented more t
han a feel-good photo opportunity. It was more than a moment. To see it happen, each side was forced to share technical information about their docking mechanisms, their communications and guidance systems, their flight control procedures … A long list of top secrets would open wide along with that hatch.
On July 17 came the historic announcement from ground control: “Apollo, Houston. I’ve got two messages for you. Moscow is a go for docking. Houston is a go for docking. It’s up to you guys. Have fun.”
The two vessels joined 140 miles above the earth. Soyuz’s oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere mixed with Apollo’s pure oxygen, and Stafford met the Soviets with a handshake. His was the first word between them: tovarich, the Russian word for friend. After more pleasantries, including an exchange of flags and plaques, the five men circled the earth for forty-seven hours. They ate together, worked together, dreamed together. And then it was time to say goodbye.
Soyuz 19 returned two days later. The last Apollo remained in orbit for three more days, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1975. With the space shuttle’s development under way, the plan called for Americans never to fly in a capsule again. It was the end of an era.
That fall, the world seemed at the end of another. The astronauts and cosmonauts toured each other’s countries, warm and friendly, smiling for cameras and waving at crowds. Wonder had made its comeback down the stretch.
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In June 1976, almost a year after rivals had become temporary friends, the Soviets launched Salyut 5. It marked the start of their steepest learning curve yet. Through successes and failures, they began to get a feel for the rhythms of long-duration missions, both in their men and in their machines. After Salyut 5 had run its course—longer than expected, because cosmonauts were getting better and better at maintaining a ship in orbit—Salyut 6 went up, and in that barrel-shaped home, the Soviets saw the benefits of their new wisdom fully realized.
The first assigned crew failed to link up, but the second crew, Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko, made it aboard, the start of a planned ninety-six days in space. That record duration required the men to assume the role of living, breathing experiments. It also necessitated a number of technological developments, such as a Soyuz exchange program, because their capsule wouldn’t survive as long in space as the crew might. Also, another docking port had been added to host the new Progress, the unmanned supply freighter still in use today.
The Progress, in both its design and length of service, is a prototypically Russian vessel. Essentially, it is a hollowed-out Soyuz capsule, fired into space on top of the same booster rocket used by its manned cousin. Where the crew normally sits, there is instead room for more than 3,700 pounds of supplies. In a separate compartment, spare tanks can be filled with propellant and water and pumped into another vessel or, today, into the International Space Station’s own stores. A third module contains the ship’s electronic equipment and sensors, the operation of which is entirely automated, including a radar system called Kurs that guides the Progress into its designated docking port. Once in place, the ship’s hatch can be cracked open by a joyous crew, hopeful that at least a few of those 3,700 pounds consist of fresh fruit, chocolate, and spices. (Once it has been emptied, the Progress is filled with trash and returned to expire in the earth’s atmosphere, burning up somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.)
Romanenko and Grechko were especially thrilled to see their own chunky Progress appear outside their window. Trying to get some flavor to penetrate their packed sinuses, they had burned through their entire condiment supply in the first five weeks of their mission. Happily, they accepted a special delivery of mustard and horseradish, bushels of scurvy-preventing apples and oranges, and beef tongue in jelly, a Russian delicacy, washed down with apricot juice.
A “psychological support group” on the ground oversaw the care packages, adding mail from home, newspapers, and even a guitar to the mix, giving the men something to listen to other than the chattering of instruments. The shrinks also encouraged the crew to keep tending their onboard garden, not because anything edible was coming out of it but because the pair seemed bolstered by the presence of green and sprouting things. (To make them feel even more at home, hardwood paneling had been installed inside their quarters.)
Keeping Romanenko and Grechko up physically was trickier. Strenuous workouts were made part of their routine, including running on an improved treadmill, which, like Progress, remains part of the program today. Their relationship was also strictly supervised. They had been told to monitor each other’s moods, to try to help each other with difficult tasks, to learn when the other man was sending out signals that he needed a shoulder to lean on or, more often, to be left alone. Given their living and working sometimes literally on top of each other, they did remarkably well. Their only suggestion to the ground was that separate sleeping compartments might be a nice touch in future stations. The ground agreed, and in the meantime, colorful partitions were sent up along with more spices and fruit. Each new lesson was layered on top of the last until, come the end of their mission, Romanenko and Grechko had virtually mastered the hard art of isolation.
Subsequent crews lasted longer on Salyut 6—Vladimir Kovalenok and Sasha Ivanchenkov stayed for 140 days in 1978, and Valery Ryumin and Vladimir Lyakhov spent 175 days up there the following year, breaking any previous endurance record and finally doubling the best effort of the Americans—but in some ways, new ground would never again be broken. By the time Ryumin went up for a second mission, spending another 185 days in orbit, just about every important hypothesis had been proved. Men could live and work in space, in harmony, for a seemingly infinite amount of time, without turning to dust or going insane; they could refurbish their homes on the fly and extend their life spans, if not indefinitely, then well enough to make their space stations track more like stars than meteors; and they established, once and for all, that men were not limited to exploring space like skin divers holding their breath. They could inhabit it. In that way, they forever raised our ceilings. They made even Mars seem possible.
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All that good was undone when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, leaving the 1980s almost as cold on earth as it was in space. The Soviets pushed on with their Salyut program, sending six long-duration crews to the seventh and largest version of the ever-evolving station, moving steadily toward a continuous manned presence in space. (The three-man crew of Leonid Kizim, Vladimir Solovyov, and Oleg Atkov set the latest endurance record, spending two-thirds of 1984—an astonishing 236 days—in orbit.) The Americans, meanwhile, launched their gleaming new space shuttle Columbia in April 1981, ignoring for the moment that it had nowhere to shuttle to. The twin efforts, in many ways, mirrored the steep ideological divide between the two countries. The Americans darted into space like fresh-faced tourists and looked good doing it. The Soviets kept pumping old, ugly technology and their army of unsmiling cosmonauts into orbit, firm in the belief that one of these days, they would figure out a way to make them stick.
They did. While the shuttle was essentially relegated to the role of satellite delivery service, the Soviets unveiled plans for Mir, the world’s first permanent multiple-module space station. It was more than just an outpost; it was a home.
The first module was launched successfully on February 20, 1986. Seeing as the Russians have never gone in for change, its design was identical to the trusted Salyut capsule, with the notable addition of several more docking ports for subsequent modules or pit-stopping spaceships. The base block, as the original module was known, was soon joined by Kvant, a full-fledged astrophysics laboratory, stuffed with telescopes and instruments. Its docking was delayed by a bag of trash that had somehow found its way outside and into the designated port. In their no-nonsense fashion, two cosmonauts suited up, went outside, fumbled around in the dark, and pulled the bag free.
Kvant 2 went up in November 1989. Most important, it contained a new toilet, allowing the cosmonauts to all but abandon the
original crapper, which sat two feet from their dinner table. The fourth and final planned module, Kristall, was tied to the end of the train six months later. With its solar panels and unflashy architecture, the completed station looked like a dragonfly, large enough to swallow six men whole.
Its size and scope allowed for grand new visions. In 1991, succumbing to the spirit of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush agreed to a ceremonial swap of spacemen. A NASA astronaut would visit Mir; a Russian cosmonaut would take a spin on the space shuttle. August’s coup attempt and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in December put those plans on hold. The chaos also left a boy-faced flight engineer named Sergei Krikalev stranded on Mir.
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In May, he had waved to his family one last time through the window of a white-and-yellow bus and been driven away, along with his commander, Anatoli Artsebarski, and a British researcher named Helen Sharman. That night, in the sleepless hours before launch, they had climbed to the roof of their quarantine hotel and raised Mir with a handheld radio, pointing an antenna at the sky. Voices had crackled through a wash of static.
The following morning, already suited up, they had boarded another bus, this one white with blue trim. Their rocket had already been pulled to the launchpad on top of a giant train car, where it waited for them, gray and shining, its white nose cap glowing in the sun. On their short drive over to it, they had watched final farewell videos from their families on small monitors. They had also been given bundles of fragrant wormwood twigs, a goodbye tradition, which they had pressed to their noses. Krikalev had lingered over them for an especially long time, breathing deep.
Their liftoff had been perfect. A little more than two days later, they had docked with Mir. Watching film of it, with the right soundtrack, an audience might have confused the maneuver with ballet. The two cosmonauts inside, Viktor Afanasiev and Musa Manarov, had greeted their visitors with bread and salt. Krikalev had seemed overwhelmed during the changeover period, those hectic days when all five cosmonauts had remained on Mir. He was often lost in thought and quiet, staring out the window. Earth looked bright and breathtaking from such great heights. All of the planet’s small erosions and scars were invisible. There were only continents and oceans, wrapped in clouds.
