“I know that,” said Tsibliyev. TSO refers to the air lock at the end of the Kvant 2 module.
Solovyov’s call for Tsibliyev to retrieve one of the station’s pumpkin-size oxygen cylinders was a standard response to depressurization scenarios in both Russian and American simulations; until this moment it had never been tried in an actual crisis. Releasing oxygen into the Mir’s atmosphere, Zimmerman realized, meant Solovyov had decided to begin “feeding the leak” – that is, replacing air that had already begun to whistle through whatever hole the Progress had poked in the hull of the Spektr module. Feeding the leak wouldn’t save the station, but it should give the crew precious extra minutes. How many depended on how fast the station was losing air.
“So open them up,” Solovyov ordered.
“I [will start] doing that right now. I am taking off the ears” – the headphones – “and am taking off to do that.”
“But someone has to stay here to maintain the connection!” Solovyov pleaded.
“Then I can’t make it.”
Tsibliyev did it anyway. Ripping off his headphones, he left his post, turned, and swam out over the command console and into the node.
“Guys?” Solovyov asked. “Someone pick up!”
There was no answer.
“Sasha?”
No answer.
“They have left . . . Guys? Someone respond.”
Lazutkin wouldn’t cut the power cable. Again he and Foale plunged down into the darkened morass of loose cords and equipment and lids and seals that lined the node walls. Somewhere in the chamber’s dim recesses, Lazutkin believed there must be a plug for the power cable. Foale ripped aside cable bundles and ran his hands over the walls. Lazutkin craned his head, looking, looking.
There. Lazutkin pulled at the power cable and followed it to a plug inside Spektr. With one furious yank, he ripped it from the wall.
Immediately Foale and Lazutkin turned to confront Spektr’s inner hatch. Lazutkin reached into the module and pulled on the hatch to close it.
It wouldn’t budge.
Both men instantly saw the problem. With the pressure dropping inside Spektr, all the air inside the station was rushing past them, seeking to escape through the unseen breach into open space. It was as if they were trying to close an open door while an invisible river surged through it. Lazutkin realized he could slip into Spektr and push from the inside, but then he would be trapped within the sealed module. He would die quickly, a hero of the motherland, but Sasha Lazutkin wasn’t ready to die yet.
Again he and Foale tugged at the hatch, straining to pull it closed.
It wouldn’t budge. Nothing they did would make it move a single inch.
They couldn’t close the hatch because of the air rushing through it. Tsibliyev dashed into Kvant 2 to get an oxygen cylinder. He turned it on and the pressure began to go up.
The hatch wouldn’t shut.
Its outer surface was smooth, with no easy handholds. Neither Foale nor Lazutkin could risk slipping his hands around the hatch’s outer edge, for fear of losing a finger.
“The lid! Let’s get a lid!” Lazutkin urged.
Foale realized that with the inside hatch unable to close, they would have to find a hatch cover to push onto the module’s open mouth from the outside.
Each of the four modules attached to the node originally came with a circular lid, vaguely resembling a garbage can lid, which sealed the hatch from the outside. All four of the lids were now strapped to spots on the node walls. They came in two sizes, heavy and light. Lazutkin reached for a heavy lid, but it was tied down by a half-dozen cloth strips, each of which, he realized, he would have to slash to free the hatch cover underneath. He simply didn’t have enough time to cut all the strips.
Instead Lazutkin reached for one of the lighter covers. It was secured to the node wall by a pair of cloth straps, both of which the slim Russian quickly severed with the knife.
Together both men lifted the lid and set it over the open hatch. The lid was originally held in place by a series of hooks spaced evenly around the hatch’s outer edges, and Lazutkin thought they would have to work this mechanism to seal the hatch. But the moment the two men affixed the cover to the open hatch, the pressure differential that foiled their earlier efforts now worked in their favor. The lid was sucked tightly into place.
Lazutkin wasn’t satisfied. He told Foale to support the hatch cover while he found the tool he needed to work the closing mechanism.
“Vasya,” Solovyov said, “what hatch are they closing in module O? The one that needs to be pushed out or pulled in?”
“Which one are you closing?” Tsibliyev yelled over at Lazutkin.
Lazutkin said something inaudible.
“The one that will be pushed toward the module,” said Tsibliyev.
“You mean the one that is part of the main module.”
“It’s like a lid that will be pressed on.”
“Understood. So you are putting on the lid? Do you have some knife? Can you unplug the cables?”
“Yes, we have closed it and with that the light indicating depressurization has turned off.”
At the NASA console Keith Zimmerman breathed a tiny sign of relief. This was the first good news he had heard. He scanned the telemetry on his screen, paying close attention to the pressure levels. If the damage was limited to Spektr, and Spektr’s hatch had been firmly sealed, the pressure should hold steady.
At 12:21 the Progress was over 300m away orbiting the station. The pressure was slowly coming up. Mission Control’s systems indicated that Mir was drifting. They asked: “What’s happening with SUD right now? Is it in the ‘indication’ mode?”
SUD referred to the station’s motion-control system; if it had entered indication mode, Mir was in free drift and thus unable to keep the solar arrays toward the sun.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll leave it.”
With the station in free drift, its remaining solar arrays were unable to track the sun and thus generate power. With no new power coming into the system, the existing onboard systems would slowly begin to drain what power was left in the station’s onboard batteries. It would take several hours for the batteries to drain altogether, longer if the crew shut down most of the station’s major systems. Solovyov, his eye already on the approaching end of the comm pass, began instructing Tsibliyev which systems to shut down, and in what order, in the event power levels began dropping while the station was out of contact with the ground.
“We are switching [off] all that is not vitally important,” Tsibliyev said.
“If you have real trouble with SEP” – SEP referred to power levels remaining in the batteries – “the priorities will be the following: first switch off the Elektron, and only in the last moment [switch off] Vozdukh.” The Vozdukh carbon dioxide scrubber was the last thing Solovyov wanted turned off, since the station was already running low on the replacement LiOH canisters.
“Elektron is switched off right now,” said Tsibliyev.
“You should be fine with SEP. Just try to save it, but I don’t think you will be anywhere near to switching off Vozdukh.”
“We’ll be watching the pressure gauge.”
“What’s the temperature right now?”
“It’s quite chilly.”
“You should give [the pressure] time to stabilize.”
“I didn’t get you.”
“The pressure has to stabilize.”
“Okay.”
“What’s the pressure right now?”
“689 and holding.”
The enormity of what had happened overcame Tsibliyev for a moment. “It’s so frustrating, Vladimir Aleexevich,” he blurted out. “It’s a nightmare.”
“That’s all right, Vasily,” replies Solovyov, trying to keep his commander focused. Albertas Versekis, a docking specialist, joined Solovyov at his console. “Now tell Albert chronologically what was happening with the Progress.”
“Everything was going as planned. W
e were thinking that we should give it some more space for acceleration. We ended up not doing it.”
“All right.”
“I started to put down the lateral velocity. It started to sink down. And then there was permanent braking—”
“Were you braking?”
“Yes, and I was trying to bring it down. I was holding it tightly with my hand to make sure that it passed away from the solar panel. It indeed passed on the side, but then it slightly bent to the left and punched the top solar panel of module O with the needle. Then it touched the attachable cold radiator with its top solar panel on the right side.”
“Did it damage it?”
“Yes, a bit. However it bounced back immediately. It seems the speed was not that great at that moment, and we probably did not have enough energy to brake [the Progress].”
“Got you.”
And then the pass was over. It was 12:42.
The crew were reunited. Foale and Lazutkin smiled but Tsibliyev was silent and dazed. While they waited for the next communications pass, they speculated as to whether the contact between Foale and Tsibliyev had caused the collision. Lazutkin:
“Before Michael hit Vasily with his foot, the Progress was flying straight toward Spektr, its back end pointing forward. [Vasily] took his hand off the controls, and the ship changed its position. As soon as Michael hit Vasily’s hand, [the ship] moved, and it hit Spektr with its side. If the ship had continued flying the way it was flying, it might have been much worse. It would have hit with the sharp edge of the rear, rather than the blunt edge of the side.”
Subsequent examination of the videotape did not show any change in the path of the Progress. Tsibliyev concluded:
“The fact is little things contributed to what happened and we had a collision, that was one of the little things.”
They needed to get the solar arrays pointed back toward the sun. The station was in a slow roll and they needed to stop this. Because the solar arrays were misaligned, the station was running off stored power in the batteries. Four minutes before the next communications pass, the lights went out in the base block, then the rest of the lights went out and the gyrodynes powered down. Their thrusters couldn’t fire without power.
When Foale suggested using the thrusters on Soyuz to stop the spin, Mission Control gave permission to try. It was difficult to calculate the thruster firings. Tsibliyev:
“When we understood all this, and Michael had made his drawings, it turned out we had to make these very short impulse [firings]. We tried to explain it to the TsUP, but the [comm] passes were so short we couldn’t. So the TsUP said, ‘Okay, guys, you try it, let’s see what happens, because we have to do something.’”
At the end of the communications pass, they were on their own.
“We can do this, Vasily,” Foale urged Tsibliyev. The commander looked skeptical.
They returned to the Soyuz. “Okay, three seconds,” said Foale. “Try it three seconds.”
Tsibliyev pressed the thruster lever three times, quickly.
It didn’t work. Foale, looking out the windows, saw that the solar arrays remained in darkness. Foale asked:
“Vasily, how long did you hold the thruster?”
“I didn’t hold it. I just hit it.” Pop. Pop. Pop.
Foale realized Tsibliyev was being conservative in an effort to save propellant. He said:
“That won’t work, I don’t think. If you just hit it, that’s not pressure enough. We need more than that. You have to actually hold it down for three seconds.”
There were more calculations and another drawing or two before Tsibliyev finally sat and followed Foale’s directions. He nudged the thruster lever for one . . . two . . . three seconds – and released.
Foale and Lazutkin studied the rotation and the solar arrays. After a moment they began to smile.
“I think it worked,” Foale said.
The station’s new orientation left Kvant 2 without power. The toilet was in Kvant 2 so they had to use a series of condoms and bags left over from an earlier experiment.
At this point the NASA ground team began to think this was the end of Phase One of the International Space Station project. But the Russians didn’t give up – they had 20 years experience of on-the-spot repairs.
The recovery plan involved charging all the available batteries from the functioning solar panels. The charged batteries would be used to power the base block’s guidance and control systems and then the other modules, the whole process taking two days. TsUP wanted the cosmonauts to put on spacesuits, enter Spektr and jury-rig a power supply there, then they could find and patch the hole which they calculated would be 3cm wide.
During the night of 26–27 June Mir lost all power due to a malfunction of the surge protectors which prevented the batteries from charging. TsUP wanted them to test the gyrodynes which drained the batteries and caused the central computer to crash. They lost all power and the crew had to begin the recovery process all over again.
By 28 June the batteries had recharged sufficiently to return powertomostofbaseblock. Therestofthe stationwould staydark until the four big solar arrays on Spektr could be reconnected. Foale improvised a movie theatre using a computer monitor and a video player, and they watched the film Apollo 13 together. Tsibliyev:
“We felt that, especially from a psychological point of view, their situation was much worse than ours – we at least had a spaceship which could get us home. With Apollo 13 they had to fly all the way around the moon in order to get back to the earth.”
Later, by email, they received a quote from Jim Lovell himself comparing the two flights:
“I understand how these guys feel, because I’ve been there as well. I know their courage and bravery.”
By 30 June NASA was considering bringing Foale back because he couldn’t do any scientific work while Spektr was sealed off.
TsUP needed to know which cables ran through the hatch to Spektr but the Russian record keeping was not up to NASA standards.
They planned an Intra Vehicular Activity (IVA) by Tsibliyev and Lazutkin while Foale remained in the Soyuz. Once inside Spektr they would reconnect the cables linking the modules which should restore the power supply. On the ground they were working out the details, especially how to modify the bulky suits to get through the narrow hatchways. At 2 am on 1 July Tsibliyev heard a sound like a muffled explosion coming from Spektr. He saw a cloud of flakes hanging around it which glistened in the sunlight. By 2 July they had gone.
Without a working ventilation system condensation was forming in the darkened modules, so Foale and Lazutkin rigged hoses to blow air into the affected modules.
On 5 July a Progress was launched, the gyrodynes were powered up to put the station in the correct position for docking and on 7 July the Progress docked safely.
Mir loses all its power
An EKG test on Tsibliyev revealed a heart beat irregularity of the kind prompted by stress – Foale would have to do the IVA instead of him.
During the IVA the node was to be depressurized. The cables were to be divided into three groups: those to be deconnected a week before, those a day before and those on the day. Lazutkin made a mistake when he deconnected the wrong cable – it carried power to the main computer which crashed and the batteries began to drain.
By dawn on 17 July the station had lost all power because the Ground Control was too slow in reacting.
Phil Engelauf was the Missions Operations Directorate (MOD) flight director at NASA. When he read the transcripts he concluded:
“If you read these transcripts, the crew calls down and says the vehicle is not performing correctly,” Engelauf remembers. “It goes right by the ground. They just say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s nice.’ About four or five times Vasily calls down and says, ‘Hey, the computer is spitting out garbage.’ And the ground says, ‘Well, we’ll look at it next pass.’ This goes on for four passes. It gets progressively worse, until they lose power altogether. These are classic symptoms
of what is called cockpit resource mismanagement. It’s a fairly classic case of [the ground] missing the first road sign and then driving right off the cliff.”
Not until a pass at 2:29 that morning, nearly five hours after Lazutkin disconnected the cable, did it finally dawn on Koneev that the station was in crisis. Engelauf wrote in his analysis:
“The crew finally told the ground, ‘Well, we have ?disconnected those] cables.’ The ground was totally surprised and asked what cable they talking about. This yielded a discussion in which TsUP finally grasped the situation onboard.”
The implications for the International Space Station were alarming. These were the same Russian ground controllers who would be working with NASA astronauts on ISS in two short years. Engelauf’s conclusions were blistering:
“There appears to be an inability on the part of TsUP, even when [telemetry] is available, to identify even major problems, like a loss of a major attitude sensor component,” he wrote. “The ground does not appear to give credence to an evident state of concern on the part of the mission commander. The sense of team cohesiveness between the ground and onboard crew, to which we are accustomed, is absent. TsUP situational awareness is also lacking. Although they are advising the crew to power off equipment, they evidently didn’t understand the severity of the power deficit nor pursue the cause [of] it.”
TsUP decided that the IVA would be performed by the next crew who would be Anatoli Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov, due on 7 August. They were given intensive training. The next NASA astronaut was to be David Wolf, who was given intensive EVA training in the Russian Orlan spacesuit.
The next mission was to have carried a French astronaut but it was postponed. NASA were upset to learn of this from CNN.
On 7 August the Soyuz carrying the next crew arrived and the new commander Anatoli Solovyov, docked manually.
On 14 August Tsibliyev and Lazutkin left Mir while Foale remained aboard. On 15 August the new crew flew their Soyuz around from the Kvant 2 docking port and filmed the damage.
On 18 August Progress M-35 was 170m away when the main computer crashed. Because the automatic (Kurs) system was disabled Solovyov had to use the TORU. He had it lined up at 5m when his screen went blank, so he brought it in blind.
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster Page 43
