The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

by Richard Russell Lawrence

  At 12:06:51, with Lazutkin and Foale floating silently behind him, looking out their windows, Tsibliyev released the braking lever. According to the instructional memo, the Progress should have been just a kilometre or slightly less above them, moving down toward the docking port. Once the ship arrived at a point about 400 metres away from the station, Tsibliyev would slow its speed to a crawl and begin inching it forward to the 50-metre point, where it would be readied for a soft docking at the Kvant docking port.

  When the TsUP’s plan had 90 seconds to go the Progress should have been approaching the 400-metre mark, but neither Lazutkin, peering out of window No.9, nor Foale could see anything. Both men knew the ship had to be out there somewhere, just beyond their view; on the screen, the station now filled four entire squares on the checkerboard overlay. An eerie feeling washed over Lazutkin. Looking at Tsibliyev’s screen, he felt as if he was being watched. But no matter what they did, they could not find the onrushing watcher.

  Tsibliyev nudged the braking lever one final time.

  “It’s moving down,” he said.

  Suddenly Lazutkin spotted the oncoming Progress, emerging from behind a solar array that until that moment had blocked his view. The ship appeared huge – bigger than he could have imagined.

  It was heading right for them.

  “My God, here it is already!” Lazutkin yelped.

  Tsibliyev couldn’t believe it.“What?”

  “It’s already close!”

  “Where is it?”

  Now everything began to happen fast. As Lazutkin looked out through the window, the brightly sunlit Progress appeared to be heading straight for a collision with base block, its twin solar arrays making it appear like some shiny white bird of prey swooping down on them.

  “The distance is one hundred fifty metres!” he shouted.

  Tsibliyev thought Lazutkin must be mistaken. His left pinkie remained clamped on the braking lever. The Progress should have been moving at a crawl.

  “It’s moving closer!” Lazutkin said. He looked outside again and saw the big ship coming on inexorably.“ It shouldn’t be coming in so fast!”

  “It’s close, Sasha, I know; I already put it down!”

  Tsibliyev was holding the controls tightly, his left pinkie clamped on the braking lever. The ship should have been slowing. It didn’t seem to be responding.

  To his horror, Lazutkin saw the Progress pass over the Kvant docking port and begin moving down the length of base block.

  Tsibliyev saw it on the screen.

  “We are moving past!” he shouted.

  Lazutkin remained glued to the window.

  “It’s moving past! Sasha, it’s moving past!”

  Lazutkin watched the Progress come on then turned to Foale.

  “Get into the ship, fast!” he told Foale, directing him to the Soyuz.

  “Come on, fast!”

  Foale, who had still not seen the Progress, acted quickly, pushing off the wall, shooting across the dinner table, and hurled over Tsibliyev’s head toward the Soyuz, which rested at its customary docking port on the far side of the node. Then, just as Foale passed over the commander, something happened that may or may not have had a profound effect on all their lives. One of Foale’s feet whacked Tsibliyev’s left arm. Later, everyone on board disagreed on the effect this accidental bump may have had on the path of the onrushing Progress.

  As Foale passed, Tsibliyev sat frozen at the controls, his face a mask of concentration. He was convinced he could keep the Progress out away from the station, that if he held tightly enough to its current course it would still miss them. Not until the last possible second, when the hull of the station ominously filled his entire screen, did the commander realize there was no avoiding a collision.

  “Oh, hell!” Tsibliyev yelled.

  As the black shadow of the Progress soared by his window, Lazutkin closed one eye and turned his head.

  The impact sent a deep shudder through the station. To Lazutkin, still glued to the base block window, it felt like a sharp, sudden tremor, a small earthquake. Foale, swimming through the node toward the open mouth of the Soyuz, felt the violent vibration when his hand brushed the side of the darkened chamber.

  “Oh!” Tsibliyev shouted, as if in pain. He stared at his screen, barely comprehending what had happened. He said aloud, “Can you imagine?”

  The master alarm sounded, eliminating all but shouted conversation.

  “We have decompression!” Tsibliyev yelled. “It looks like it hit the solar panel! Hell! Sasha, that’s it!”

  Confusion broke out as Lazutkin turned and began to swim toward the node, intent on readying the Soyuz for immediate evacuation.

  “Wait, come back, Sasha!” Tsibliyev barked.

  It was the first decompression aboard an orbiting spacecraft in the history of manned space travel. As Lazutkin hovered beside him, waiting for an order, Tsibliyev remained at his post, staring at the screen, like the captain of a stricken ship.

  “How can this be?” he asked.“How can this be?”

  After that his words were drowned out in the manic din of the master alarm.

  Floating alone in the node, Foale paused. After a moment he realized he was still alive. His ears popped, just a bit, telling him that whatever hole had been punctured in the hull, it was probably a small one. The station’s wounds, whatever they were, were not immediately fatal. They should have enough time to evacuate.

  He turned and faced the entrance to the Soyuz, where a tangle of cables, a mass of gray-white spaghetti, spilled out of the escape craft’s open mouth. Executing a deft little flip, he turned backward and entered the Soyuz feet first, extending his legs behind him, his head and shoulders protruding from the capsule.

  As he turned to look back toward base block, Foale fully expected Lazutkin and Tsibliyev to come charging into the node after him to begin the evacuation. They didn’t. Foale waited five, ten, then twenty seconds. There was no sign of the Russians. They remained somewhere back in base block, out of his sight.

  After roughly a minute of waiting, Foale began to worry. He was certain the Progress struck the station either in base block or in Kvant. These were considered “non-isolatable” areas – that is, a hull breach in either area could not be sealed off. In emergency drills simulating a meteorite strike against the hull of either module, the crew was given no option but to abandon ship. Foale couldn’t understand why Lazutkin and Tsibliyev weren’t evacuating.

  Tsibliyev swivelled out of his seat and crouched by the floor window behind him. There, barely 30 feet away, so close he felt he could reach out and touch it, he saw the Progress sagging against the base of one of Spektr’s solar arrays. It looked as if the long needle on the leading edge of the cargo ship’s hull had pierced a jagged hole in the array’s wing-like expanse. He couldn’t be certain, but the Progress appeared lodged against the hull. Lazutkin crouched by the window and looked down. He saw it too.

  The commander turned, thinking he would fire one of Progress’s forward thrusters to, as he later put it, “kick it” off the station. But just as he began to leave the window, he saw the cargo ship shift and move forward once again, striking and denting a boxy gray radiator on the side of Spektr’s hull. Then it kept moving forward and, after a long moment, floated free again.

  Tsibliyev held his breath, hoping that the Progress would now fly free of the station without hitting any more of its outer structures.

  “Where are they?”

  Foale couldn’t understand what Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were doing. Emergency procedures mandated that they immediately evacuate the station, but the two Russians were nowhere to be seen. It occurred to Foale that his two crewmates were doing something to try and save the station, when they should be evacuating it. He knew that this kind of going-down-with-the-ship mentality wouldn’t have been unusual among the pride-soaked cosmonaut corps; it was precisely the reckless kind of behaviour Linenger had been warning everyone about. Foale crawled out of the
Soyuz and began to fly back toward base block, intent on finding out what was going on.

  But the moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, Lazutkin hurtled out of base block into the node. In a flash he was at the little ship’s entrance. Foale, realizing that Lazutkin was now prepared to begin the evacuation, was unsure of his role.

  “Sasha, what can I do?” he asked.

  Lazutkin ignored or didn’t hear the question; the alarm was so loud it was difficult to hear anything. Moving with the fury of a man in hand-to-hand combat, Lazutkin grabbed the giant, worm-like ventilation tube and tore it in half. Wordlessly he seized cable after cable, furiously rending each one at its connection point. Foale watched in silence.

  It took Lazutkin barely a minute to disconnect all the cables. Finally only one remained. It was the PVC tube, which channelled condensate water from the Soyuz into the station’s main water tanks. Lazutkin could not separate it with his hands. He needed a tool.

  A wrench. They needed a wrench. Lazutkin looked frantically for one all around the node, which was lined with spare hatches and tools and equipment. He and Foale spent nearly a minute in search of a wrench before Lazutkin found one, floating by a blue thread. He handed it to Foale and showed him how to unfasten the PVC tube. Foale retreated into the Soyuz, applied the wrench, and began turning as fast as he could.

  When he was certain Foale knew how to unfasten the PVC tube, Lazutkin turned toward the entrance to the Spektr module. Foale, while saying nothing aloud, remained convinced the leak was in base block or Kvant. Lazutkin didn’t have to guess. He had seen the Progress lodged against the Spektr module’s solar array. He assumed that whatever breach the hull had suffered, it almost certainly occurred in Spektr. Lazutkin pushed off from the Soyuz entrance, arced across the node, and shimmied into Spektr.

  Diving head first into the module, he immediately heard an angry hissing noise from somewhere below and to his left. It was, he knew, the sound of air escaping into space. His heart sank. At this moment, Sasha Lazutkin was certain they were all about to die.

  On Mir the hatchways between the modules were 3 feet in diameter. There were cables running through them so that they couldn’t be closed without cutting or removing the cables.

  Lazutkin realized immediately that in order to save the station, he had to somehow seal off Spektr. Like all the other hatchways, it was lined with wrapped packets of thin white and gray cables, 18 cables in all, plus a giant worm-like ventilation tube.

  A knife, Lazutkin thought: I’ve got to find a knife to cut the cables. While Foale remained inside the Soyuz, finishing off the PVC tube, Lazutkin soared back through the node and dived headfirst into base block, where he saw Tsibliyev poised to begin talking to the ground. Vaulting over the commander’s head, Lazutkin shot down the length of base block, past the dinner table, and into the mouth of Kvant. He remembered a large pair of scissors he had stowed alongside one of the panels, but when he reached the panel, he was heartsick: the scissors weren’t there. Then he saw a tiny, four-inch knife – “better to cut butter with than cables,” as Lazutkin remembered it. Normally he used the blade to peel the insulation off cables that needed to be rewired.

  Lazutkin grabbed the knife and flew back down to the node. Sticking his upper body into Spektr, he grabbed a bundle of cables and instantly realized his plan wouldn’t work: the cables were too thick to be cut with his little blade. Each of the bundles was fitted into one of dozens of connectors that lined the inside of the hatch. Frantically Lazutkin began grabbing the cable bundles one after another, unscrewing their connections and tossing the loose ends aside, to float in the air.

  After a moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, where he had finally disconnected the PVC tube, just as Lazutkin finished ripping apart the first few cables. Foale was immediately surprised to see Lazutkin working at the mouth of Spektr. Still believing the leak was somewhere back in base block or Kvant, he was convinced that Lazutkin was isolating the wrong part of the station. If Foale was correct, sealing off Spektr would be a disastrous move. It would actually reduce the station’s air supply, thereby causing Mir’s remaining atmosphere to rush out of the breach even faster.

  Foale remembered:

  “I was still very concerned we were isolating the wrong place. I was not going to stop him physically – yet. But that was my next thought: Should I try and stop him?”

  Burrough:

  Instead, intimidated by the sheer fury with which Lazutkin was tearing at the cables, Foale floated by and watched. As Lazutkin rended each line, its loose end floated out into the node – “eighteen snakes floating around, like the head of Medusa,” Foale recalled. Foale began grabbing the loose lines and binding them with rubber bands he found in the node. Finally, he said something.

  “Why are we closing off Spektr? It’s the wrong module to close off. If we’re gonna do a leak-isolation thing, we have to start with Kvant 2.”

  Foale was about to say more, when Lazutkin cut him off.

  “Michael,” he said, “I saw it hit Spektr.”

  And with that Foale at last fathomed Lazutkin’s urgency: seal Spektr, and they save the station.

  It took almost three minutes for Lazutkin to tear apart fifteen of the eighteen cables. The remaining three cables didn’t have any visible connection points. They were solid and unbreakable. Lazutkin thought of the knife. He retrieved it from his pocket and slashed a thin data cable for one of the NASA experiments. The next moment he slashed a leftover French data cable from one of the Euro-Mir missions. One cable remained. One cable whose removal would allow them to seal the hatch and save the station.

  But Lazutkin received a rude shock when he began sawing into the last and thickest of the three cables. Sparks flew up into his face. It was a power cable.

  Foale saw a frightened look cross the Russian’s face.

  “Sasha, go ahead!” Foale urged. “Cut it!” A beat. “Cut it!”

  But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cut it.

  At the moment the Progress struck the station, Mir was just coming into communications range of TsUP. Burrough:

  It was at this point that Tsibliyev, still floating anxiously at the command center in base block, heard the TsUP hailing him. Nikolai Nikiforov, the shift flight director, was at the command console in the TsUP. Vladimir Solovyov stood out of sight in a separate control room used for Progress operations. There was static, and for a moment Tsibliyev’s words could not be heard.

  “Siriuses!” Nikiforov shouted. “Siriuses!”

  Suddenly Tsibliyev’s voice broke through the static. “Yes, yes, we copy! There was no braking. There was no braking. It just stalled. I didn’t manage to turn the ship away. Everything was going on fine, but then, God knows why, it started to accelerate and run into module O, damaged the solar panel. It started to [accelerate], then the station got depressurized. Right now the pressure inside the station is at 700.”

  Sirius was Mir’s codename. Module O was Spektr.

  Soloyov, immediately realizing what had happened, got on comm. Burrough:

  “Guys, where are you now?”

  “We are getting into the [Soyuz] . . .”

  Chaos broke out for several moments on the floor of the TsUP as Solovyov and the other controllers tried to determine exactly what was happening aboard the station. The comm broke up for a moment.

  “Copy, damn it!” Solovyov barked.

  “Oh, hell,” Tsibliyev blurted out. “We don’t know where the leak is.”

  “Can you close any hatch?” interjected Nikiforov.

  “We can’t close anything,” Tsibliyev said hurriedly. “Here everything is so screwed up that we can’t close anything.”

  As Tsibliyev’s words crackled over the auditorium loudspeakers, Keith Zimmerman couldn’t understand anything the commander was saying: he spoke very little Russian. Then, suddenly, his interpreter said, “They hit something.”

  Zimmerman wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?” he said. From the interpreter’s even tone of v
oice, he guessed that maybe one of the cosmonauts had hit his thumb with a hammer.

  “The Progress,” Aleksandr said quietly. “It hit the station. The pressure’s going down.”

  Zimmerman went numb. This was not something a 29-year-old MOD assistant was accustomed to hearing.

  “Wait, Vasya, what are you doing now?” Nikiforov asked.

  “We are getting ready to leave. The pressure is already at 690. It continues to drop.”

  “Can you switch on any blowers?”

  “I think we can.”

  “Open all existing oxygen tanks.”

  “Sasha,” Tsibliyev hollered to Lazutkin, “have you closed the hatch?”

  Lazutkin’s reply was drowned out as the station’s master alarm continued braying.

  “Vasya,” said Solovyov, “what are you doing now?”

  “DSD has turned on. We managed to close the hatch to module O.” This was wishful thinking: as Tsibliyev spoke, Lazutkin still hadn’t cleared the last cable from the hatch. DSD was a depressurization sensor.

  “Module O. Has [the Progress] run into module O?”

  “Yes, it hit module O.”

  “Is the hatch closed right now?”

  “Sasha is closing it right now.”

  “What’s happening with the pressure?”

  “DSD turned on when pressure dropped down to 690.”

  Solovyov interjected. “Can you pass through [the node] right now? We should have extra [oxygen] tanks somewhere in TSO.”