The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“We were first alarmed by the fire. Usually it takes a year or more to fully relieve the stress after something like this. It’s scary, and you could see it. The fear was in them. It really changes a person’s behavior. They became more cautious. They didn’t feel as relaxed. We started picking up nuances we didn’t pick up before. They became more demanding to the ground. For instance, [if] Vasily had a question the ground said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And they became irritated. After the failed docking, it became clear to us that the psychological state of the cosmonauts was becoming worse. I wrote a paper with an unfavorable psychological prognosis, and I called for everybody’s attention to change their attitude toward the crew. But the attitude remained the same. The attitude can be characterized as a sweat-sucking system. [The TsUP] just makes them work harder and harder.”

Bogdashevsky’s first warnings to the TsUP came in a report written on March 23. His preliminary diagnosis for both Tsibliyev and Lazutkin was exhaustion. Further, he felt Tsibliyev was suffering from something he called “ostheno-neurotic syndrome,” a related condition. “When a person is osthetic,” Bogdashevsky explains, “he gets tired faster and gets irritated. It depends on the person, the mind. One person can get depressed. Another person, his blood pressure changes. It depends.” In Tsibliyev’s case, it had led to increasing irritation, both at the ground and at Linenger.

Linenger’s EVA “just out there dangling”

Linenger and Tsibliyev were scheduled to do an EVA together, the purpose of which was to set up a piece of equipment called the Optical Properties Monitor (OPM) on the end of the Kristall module. The OPM was the size of a suitcase. Considerable friction had built up between Linenger and Tsibliyev which affected their preparation. As part of their preparation astronauts and cosmonauts usually discussed what they were going to do in detail. Linenger and Tsibliyev didn’t.

They were going to leave the station through the airlock which had been damaged in 1990. The set of clamps which had been used to close the hatch was still there. Burrough:

It was this set of clamps that Linenger and Tsibliyev were staring at uneasily seven years later. To his relief, the commander opened the hatch without incident and crawled outside onto an adjoining ladder just after nine o’clock. Linenger began to follow. Outside the sun was rising. The Russians had planned the EVA at sunrise so as to get the longest period of light. But because of that, Linenger’s first view of space was straight into the blazing sun.

Linenger told his post-flight debriefing session:

“The first view I got was just blinding rays coming at me. Even with my gold visor down, it was just blinding. [I] was basically unable to see for the first three or four minutes going out the hatch.”

Once his eyes cleared the situation got worse. He exited the airlock. Then he climbed out onto a horizontal ladder that stretched out along the side of the module into the darkness. Trying to get his bearings, he was suddenly hit by an overwhelming sense that he was falling, as if from a cliff. As he clamped his tethers onto the handrail, he fought back a wave of panic and tightened his grip on the ladder. But he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was plummeting through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour. His mind raced: You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re not going to fall. The bottom is way far away.

And now a second, even more intense feeling washed over him: he was not just plunging off a cliff. The entire cliff was crumbling away.

Linenger told his debriefers:

“It wasn’t just me falling, but everything was falling, which gave [me] an even more unsettling feeling. So, it was like you had to overcome forty years or whatever of life experiences that [you] don’t let go when everything falls. It was a very strong, almost overwhelming sensation that you just had to control. And I was able to control it, and I was glad I was able to control it. But I could see where it could have put me over the edge.”

The disorientation was paralyzing. There was no up, no down, no side. There was only three-dimensional space. It was an entirely different sensation from spacewalking on the shuttle, where the astronauts were surrounded on three sides by a cargo bay. And it felt nothing – nothing – like the Star City pool. Linenger was an ant on the side of a falling apple, hurtling through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour, acutely aware what would happen if his Russian-made tethers broke. As he clung to the thin railing, he tried not to think about the handrail on Kvant that came apart during a cosmonaut’s spacewalk in the early days of Mir. Loose bolts, the Russians said.

It was Linenger’s first EVA. As the two men clung to the ladder, Tsibliyev said:

“Jerry, just wait, I’ll go first.”

The Russian stopped for a second to admire the view. It was Tsibliyev’s sixth EVA – he had done five with Serebrov in 1993. He remembered:

“There is suddenly this huge planet below you. Inside the station, you cannot see it, only parts of it. When you get out, you really see it, the whole thing, it’s so unusual, so dramatic, so emotional, you have to be a little scared.”

With a final glance downward, Tsibliyev surged forward in search of the spot to place a small radiation dosimeter, the first of several tasks on their list that day.

For the longest time Linenger remained frozen. Nothing was familiar. Nothing looked as it did in the swimming pool at Star City. And everything was falling. Slowly he inched along the handrail, clamping and unclamping his tethers every few feet. With Tsibliyev almost out of sight ahead of him, he continued like this for several minutes, until the handrail suddenly stopped. Raising his head to look around, Linenger saw he was surrounded by all manner of structures the Russians had never told him about. Solar arrays towered over him like statuary. Clipped everywhere, to the handrails, to arrays, everywhere, was a thicket of little sensors and experiments.

“Vasily, which way can I go?” Linenger asked. He pointed off to one side. “Can I go this way?”

“No,” the commander replied, waving his hand. “Solar panel. Watch out.”

“Can I go this way?” he asked, pointing to what appeared to be a path through the panels.

“No. Solar sensor.”

Linenger’s anxiety rose as he examined the cluster of giant winglike solar panels he had entered. The edges were sharp – razor sharp is the term he later used in his debriefings. He was certain that if he bumped into one of the arrays, an edge would cut and puncture his space suit, instantly killing him. The outside of Kvant 2, in fact, was by far the most crowded exterior surface of the entire station. Because its outer hull was closest to the airlock, Kvant 2 was covered with all manner of Russian and American experiments. Richard Fullerton called it “a pincushion.”

NASA’s attitude to Linenger’s EVA, in fact, was strangely at odds with directives given the only other astronauts to walk outside Mir. A year earlier, during Shannon Lucid’s mission, two shuttle astronauts, Rich Clifford and Linda Godwin, climbed out of the shuttle Atlantis to attach experiments onto the docking module at the end of Kristall. Both the Russians and NASA had forbidden Clifford and Godwin from venturing off the docking module into the field of experiments and solar arrays farther up the hull of Kristall.“ They said it wasn’t safe,”