by Jay Chladek
Astronaut Selection
When the announcement was made about the Shuttle-Mir Program, many members of the astronaut office were less than enthusiastic about taking part. But there were some, both veterans and rookies, who felt that a tour of duty on Mir just might be a good opportunity. The numbers of volunteers were not large, though. Rather than being able to select the best candidates for the Shuttle-Mir missions from a sea of applicants while taking into account psychological temperament and experience, NASA didn’t have much choice except to take all those who volunteered for the Mir program.
Norm Thagard, a veteran of the first 1978 class of shuttle astronauts, would be the first visitor as part of the original pre-ISS agreement. He would fly to Mir aboard a Soyuz craft and, after several months in orbit, return home with his cosmonaut crewmates aboard a shuttle that ferried up two other cosmonauts to take over the next increment. Fellow 1978 veteran Shannon Lucid would fly the first official ISS Phase One mission a few months later. John Blaha would fly next, exchanging positions with Lucid. He would be followed by newcomer astronaut Jerry Linenger, who joined the astronaut office in 1992. Michael Foale, a veteran astronaut of dual U.S. and UK citizenship, would fly next. Taking over for him would be Wendy Lawrence, while David Wolf would perform the final increment before ISS Phase One was completed. Selected for backup astronaut roles were Bonnie Dunbar for Thagard’s mission and Andy Thomas for the program’s other nonflying backup. Scott Parazynski had also been selected for the Mir program, but he was ultimately scrubbed from the assignment since he was a little too tall to safely fit in a Soyuz TM crew couch, as each astronaut would have to be fitted for a Sokol pressure suit and custom seat liner in case they needed to use the Soyuz in an emergency.
The Language Barrier
While the ASTP astronauts and their cosmonaut colleagues had many years to train and integrate as a combined crew, that wasn’t necessarily an option open to the Shuttle-Mir astronauts. Each training period would last about two years, but they wouldn’t be able to integrate with specific cosmonaut crews due to the complications brought about by launch delays. The language barrier would be the largest hurdle to overcome, so each astronaut and many of their support crewmembers on the ground would have to take what was akin to a crash course in Russian in order to communicate with their cosmonaut crewmates and instructors. Many of the Russians spoke English, but it was not their native language. And unlike ASTP, where the crews would speak each other’s languages, the cosmonauts had no mandate to improve their English unless they were flying on shuttle missions. The instructors at Star City would conduct training sessions in Russian as well, both spoken and written. While language interpreters helped, they couldn’t be sent into orbit of course.
Norm Thagard began taking classes in Russian before he was officially announced in order to help give him a leg up on training. Some of the other Shuttle-Mir candidates followed his lead. To help with the language, the first astronauts assigned to the Mir program were sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California, for Russian study. The DLI was a school established in World War II to teach members of the military and intelligence community foreign languages. During the Cold War its role was expanded to train members of other federal agencies, and the language base was expanded to include Russian.
Instructors at DLI said that at minimum it would take eighteen months to learn Russian with intense study, compared to six months needed to become reasonably fluent in Spanish or French. While it wasn’t the hardest language of all to learn, it would certainly not be an easy one. According to Jerry Linenger’s account, the commanding officer of the DLI reinforced this to him in their first meeting by saying there were “no shortcuts.” Each astronaut had only five weeks to learn Russian because somebody at NASA had explained to the DLI that their candidates were willing to learn and smarter than average people. The DLI itself at least welcomed the work, albeit reluctantly. So five weeks it would be, for better or for worse.
One might liken the training approach used by the DLI for a five-week Russian-language class to taking somebody with only a rudimentary knowledge of swimming and throwing them into the middle of a lake. The student would either sink or quickly learn to swim. At the end of five weeks, after showing at least a basic understanding of the language (which, depending on who was asked, is the subject of debate), it was off to Russia for training at Star City on Mir and Soyuz systems in the Russian language. After the Russian-language classes, training in a post-Soviet-era Russia likely had many astronauts wondering if they had gone off the deep end.
Culture Shock
Compared to Star City of the early 1970s, Star City of the 1990s was both similar in many ways and very different. By 1994 the years had not been kind. Hyperinflation had caused the Russian ruble to devalue to the point where eight rubles would barely buy a pack of chewing gum. U.S. dollars became the preferred currency for most purchases. Retired Russian military officers and officials living at Star City who had worked most of their lives for the state saw their pensions become nearly worthless, to the point that some members of their families were working jobs in Moscow just to make ends meet. During the training period for the first three Mir increments, astronauts were staying at the old three-story hotel built for ASTP, which was known by its rather unflattering name, the Prophylactorium. According to eyewitness accounts, it had seen better days.
Part of the economic package from the United States was to fund the building of brand new duplex facilities to house astronauts and their wives (or husbands), but the work remained mostly unfinished until Jerry Linenger and Michael Foale’s training periods. There have been reports that some of that money was funneled away to build lavish houses for some members of the Energia staff and members of the military. There were also rumors of Russian mafia corruption.
Jerry Linenger’s book Off the Planet told of times when the Chevy vans purchased by NASA for official use would end up getting stolen from Star City and never be seen again. On another occasion, the duplex apartment of Michael Foale was vandalized and had valuables stolen from it while he was back in Houston. Linenger wrote that security didn’t really improve until he planted a rumor to some Russian colleagues that he was going to apply for a gun permit to protect his wife. She was staying with him in Russia while she worked for a NASA contractor and was pregnant with their first child at the time. After that, Russian security dramatically improved, and the thefts dropped to almost nothing.
Russian training on space systems, at a glance, is similar to training in the United States. But while NASA tends to favor training in specific skill sets, Russia focuses primarily on theory to make their cosmonauts jacks-of-all-trades. Crewmembers had to take periodic exams to see if they absorbed the information they were being taught, and a crew would not fly if they failed their final exam on the eve of a spaceflight.
What made things difficult for the Americans, though, was that a lot of the information being taught was not written down, and people were discouraged from taking what few training manuals they could find back to their apartments to study. This practice didn’t just extend to the Americans, though, as research cosmonauts and commercial fliers from other countries have reported similar behavior by the Russians toward them. The Soyuz simulators were up to the task, but there were concerns that the Mir simulators were not completely representative of the nearly decade-old station with years of clutter and modified systems. Still, everyone made do.
Camaraderie and close relationships were formed between many of the NASA, Roscosmos, U.S. contractor, and Energia people as time went on, but it didn’t start out that way. Some Americans bonded more openly with their Russian counterparts than others. Of the astronauts who lived and trained in Star City, Michael Foale became the most “Russianized,” as he tried to totally immerse himself in Russian culture, speaking Russian whenever possible during his off-duty times and opening his apartment to his Russian friends in Star City. Dave Wolf apparently also succeeded in drinking some o
f his Russian colleagues under the table during some legendary wild parties on the weekends. To the Russians, the ability to hold liquor can command just as much respect as anything else, and Dave could do it as well as anyone.
Both NASA and elements of its contractor workforce set up offices at both Star City and the TsUP in Kaliningrad. In addition to the instruction on Soyuz and Mir systems, it would be up to these support teams to come up with and approve the scientific experiments that would fly as well as to provide on-orbit support since once the shuttle had undocked, there would be almost no direct support from Houston. It has been said that NASA didn’t necessarily send their best support people to Russia. Ideally, personnel from NASA’s Mission Operations Directorate should have been sent to manage the work that would take place on orbit, since that was their purpose for shuttle missions. The Mission Operations Directorate had their hands full, though, working on the ISS, and only got involved with the shuttle-related tasks. But assurances were made from NASA management that the Russians had things well in hand. In those days, NASA would mostly be just along for the ride.
On 3 February 1994 the space shuttle Discovery launched from KSC on mission STS-60, which would be the first ISS Phase One mission. While not scheduled to rendezvous or dock with Mir, the shuttle carried Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev into orbit as part of a six-person crew for a nine-day scientific mission that involved biomedical and materials-processing experiments in the newly developed Spacehab module. As part of a three-way communications link, Sergei Krikalev contacted his crewmates on Mir, and their exchange was seen on live television in the United States. The next time Mir and a shuttle would be in communication with one another, they would be a lot closer.
Shuttle Preparations
As NASA’s side of the ISS Phase One program progressed, the role of the shuttle was refined somewhat. While the shuttle had been designed to support a space station, operations in a close proximity to Mir were something new and required precision maneuvers that the shuttle had not originally been intended to fly. The Russians also had concerns about exhaust from the shuttle’s hypergolic thrusters potentially contaminating Mir’s solar arrays, since shuttle thrusters were much larger than those found on Russian spacecraft.
To help limit the amount of thruster firings needed for rendezvous and docking, the shuttle would fly a plus R-bar approach (R standing for “radius”). Rather than having the shuttle approach Mir from in front or behind and using thrusters for braking, it would approach the station from below, increasing orbital altitude as it closed the distance. This approach would act as a natural form of braking due to how the orbit was set up, so thrusters would not need to be fired close to the station before docking. NASA successfully tested this approach method using the space shuttle Atlantis on STS-66 with a free-flying satellite payload.
As a full dress rehearsal to the first shuttle-docking mission, Discovery lifted off on mission STS-63 in early February 1995. The launch window for this mission was only five minutes long in order to target Mir’s 51.6-degree orbital inclination. Joining the NASA crew was cosmonaut Vladimir Titov, only the second Russian to fly on shuttle. While STS-63 would conduct some experiments directly related to future ISS construction on this flight, along with some joint Russian and U.S. experiments, the highlight would be the rendezvous and close approach to Mir midway through the mission. But it almost didn’t happen.
Just after launch, two of Discovery’s thrusters developed slow leaks and were trailing fuel particles. The Russians were very concerned about having the orbiter make a close approach to the station with such a leak. But after a day in orbit, the leaks abated, and the go was given for close approach. On Discovery, shuttle commander Jim Weatherbee and female shuttle pilot Eileen Collins approached to within eleven meters of Mir.
Aboard Mir, cosmonauts Aleksandr Viktorenko, Valery Polyakov, and Yelena Kondakova monitored the approach, shooting video and still photographs of the event. Polyakov was on board setting a new space endurance record of over a year in space. During his mission, he spent 437 days in orbit before returning home in March with the TM-20 crew. Yelena Kondakova was only the third female cosmonaut to fly in orbit after Tereshkova and Savitskaya. She was married to Valery Ryumin and served a normal five-month tour of duty on Mir before any of the Americans (including Shannon Lucid) got to visit the station.
During the point of closest approach, Weatherbee commemorated the event by saying, “As we are bringing our spaceships closer together, we are bringing our nations closer together. The next time we approach, we will shake your hand, and together we will lead our world into the next millennium.” From Mir, Viktorenko responded, “We are one. We are human.” After closest approach, Discovery backed away and spent a portion of the next orbit carefully circling Mir from a safe distance, shooting photographs of the complex before leaving. The next time a shuttle visited, it would link up with the complex.
Norm Thagard’s Mission
On 14 March 1995 the Soyuz rocket carrying Mir EO-18 was ready to blast into the heavens from Baikonur. Aboard Soyuz TM-21, Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennadi Strekalov were joined by NASA astronaut Norman Thagard. It was the first time an American had ever flown on a rocket of Russian design. Launch proceeded just fine; after two days, the trio firmly docked at Mir and performed the normal handover from the Mir EO-17 crew of Viktorenko, Polyakov, and Kondakova, who returned home soon after.
The schedule called for Thagard to conduct most of his scientific research in the Spektr module, which was supposed to be delivered early in the mission. But Spektr’s delivery date slipped, and NASA’s science team led by Peggy Whitson had to scale back their plans and use equipment that could either be delivered by a Progress module or was already aboard Mir. As Whitson explained, “We found out that the Spektr science module was going to be delayed until near the end of that expedition. So over the course of a weekend, we had to go through and cut and reprioritize. So it was very much pulling things together that we could get on a Progress, make it happen, and still meet as many of our science objectives as possible.”
Part of the data gathering Thagard was assigned to do included collection of blood and tissue samples from both himself and his cosmonaut crewmates. Without access to Spektr’s hardware, Thagard was placing the samples in a small freezer left on Mir by ESA astronaut Ulf Merbold, who had visited the station five months earlier. But the freezer was having trouble maintaining low temperatures during Thagard’s mission due to a buildup of ice on its condenser, and it needed to be defrosted. Unfortunately, the attempts to defrost the freezer proved futile, and many of the biological samples had to be scrapped.
As for other experiments Thagard did, they primarily involved diet and metabolic measurements. The original plan was for Norm to eat a structured diet from bar-coded food containers with known nutritional contents. Supplemental food could be eaten, but a diary would need to be kept for scientists on the ground. Unfortunately, Mir didn’t exactly have a convenient stash of paper to take notes on, so Thagard stuck to the prearranged food and didn’t eat anything else that would require note taking. Midway through the mission, the regular body mass measurements were showing that Thagard was losing weight since the caloric intake was not keeping up with his daily nutritional requirements. Finally, it took a direct order from doctors on the ground before Thagard would eat the snack foods on board to get his caloric intake back to normal levels.
Spektr Arrives
The Spektr module finally was launched in late May and docked with Mir on 1 June 1995. In preparation for Spektr’s arrival, the Kristall module had its solar arrays retracted and was moved using the Lyappa arm and drogue system to the right-side docking port. Dezhurov and Strekalov relocated one of Kristall’s two solar arrays to a new mounting point on Kvant 1 during an EVA in late May, and the second Kristall array was folded up to prevent any clearance issues with a docking shuttle. Spektr executed a perfect docking and then performed the now-standard Lyappa arm transfer to finally be berthed
in Kristall’s old location of the bottom docking port.
Spektr contained about seven hundred kilograms of American equipment for experiments in addition to many of the normal systems it was equipped with prior to its mothballing. Spektr was originally outfitted with systems of a military nature, as it was intended to carry surveillance equipment like the Almaz and the Cosmos 1686 spacecraft. When Spektr was repurposed, the surveillance equipment located at the front of the module was replaced with a cone-shaped section containing two solar arrays mounted diagonally, in addition to its normal arrays mounted midway down on each side of the module. Some of the scientific equipment it contained included a binocular radiometer, a lidar system for atmospheric study, an interstellar gas detector, and several different spectrometers. It also contained a scientific airlock for exposing various experiments to space. The four new solar arrays would help to supplement Mir’s power supply.
For his final month on Mir, Norm Thagard spent his time unpacking the Spektr module and getting the equipment ready for the next American astronaut to visit the station, even though that visit wouldn’t occur for a few months yet. He also got a chance to conduct some additional science as well. Given that Thagard had spent much of his time not really having any experiments to perform for most of May due to the busted freezer and the problems with the food-intake experiment, it was a welcome change. All he could really do before Spektr arrived was perform his normal exercise regime. Thagard’s presence on Mir was almost like that of a research cosmonaut on a short-duration mission. Although he was fully trained in Mir’s systems, controllers and his cosmonaut crewmates apparently would not allow him to take part in normal station-maintenance chores or aid in preparation for their space walks. Having a lot of downtime, for an astronaut who has trained hard and knows that every minute spent on orbit can be precious due to its cost, can be almost torture.
