recalls Clifford, who remembers agreeing wholeheartedly once he got outside Mir and glanced up the sides of Kristall.“ There are appendages all over Kristall,” he said. “Some of them were visibly sharp. Snag points. Sharp edges. Not a clear translation path.”
But a year later, no one raised questions about sending Linenger, a first-time spacewalker, out onto the station’s crowded outer hull. No one had mapped the arrays and experiments for him. No one had shown him the safest, or for that matter any, transit routes across the hull. He was on his own and he was frightened.
Tsibliyev hustled on ahead, leaving Linenger to fend for himself. Slowly the American inched forward, clipping his tethers to whatever handrails he could find and taking care to avoid the solar arrays. Finally, midway up Kvant 2, Linenger reached the end of the Strela arm. The arm was a 46-foot-long pole that, with the use of a hand crank at its base, could be telescoped out to its full length. To get over to the docking area at the end of Kristall, where they were to install the OPM, their plans called for Linenger to physically mount the end of the arm, as he would a horse and for Tsibliyev, using the crank, to extend the arm and swing Linenger out and across open space to the docking area. The idea was roughly the same as fly casting for trout. The boom was a fishing pole in the commander’s hands; Linenger was the hook. Once Linenger was swung safely across to the docking area, he was to retether his end of the pole to the station’s outer hull. Tsibliyev would then crawl his way along the arm to join him.
The slow-motion ballet began as Linenger started untethering the end of the Strela from the outer hull of Kvant 2. Meanwhile Tsibliyev made his way along the length of the module to the outer hull of base block, where the base of the Strela arm was anchored. As Tsibliyev readied the arm, Linenger clipped the unwieldy OPM unit to a hook at the end of it. Then he gingerly shimmied himself onto the boom beside it, hugging the slender steel rod with his knees and forearms.
Slowly, Tsibliyev swung the boom free, sending Linenger arcing out into open space. For Linenger, leaving the solid footing of the station’s outer hull behind, the impression of free fall was almost unbearable. Fighting a brief surge of panic, he was seized by the idea that the boom was about to break, sending him spiraling off into the vastness of space. Linenger later told his debriefers:
“I’m just out there dangling… very uncomfortable out there… again, you just overcome it. You say, ‘Okay, if it breaks, it breaks.’”
It got worse when Tsibliyev began extending the boom. To lenghten the arm, the commander had to forcibly yank on a set of handles, as if pulling a wooden stake out of the ground. Each yank, if successful, freed one more segment of the arm, thus lengthening the boom. For Linenger, hanging out at the end of the arm in open space, the yanks were nightmarish. Each time Tsibliyev pulled, the American felt a sudden jerk, and involuntarily tightened his grip.
Then things got even worse. As the boom extended out toward its full length, Linenger noticed it was beginning to sway, as if in a breeze. As the commander extended the arm still farther, Linenger felt the whole boom vibrate under him, then it began to slowly swing back and forth. He wanted to scream. After several long moments of this, the boom was finally extended to its full length, and Tsibliyev began attempting to maneuver Linenger across open space to the docking area at the end of Kristall.
This was where the real anxiety began for Linenger. The boom was so long, and the solar arrays so large, that Tsibliyev could not physically see Linenger for much of the time he was clinging to the end of the arm. The commander swung the arm by instinct in the direction of Kristall, while Linenger attempted to give him directions. But, Linenger learnt almost immediately, conventional directions didn’t mean much in space.
“To the right!” Linenger said at one point. “From you, to the right!” But Tsibliyev was standing at a 45- degree angle to Linenger. His right was somewhere beneath the American’s knee. Tsibliyev began craning his neck to spot Linenger, who tried in vain to give more directions.
“I need to go out two feet more!”
“No, no, I need to go out farther to miss this solar panel!”
It was no use. Tsibliyev could not follow his directions. Gradually, the Russian began to swing the boom over toward Kristall, but its swaying and vibrating were giving Linenger fits. By this point, the boom was so long it began to swing on a wider and wider arc. Linenger was certain an S-curve had developed in the pole, limiting the commander’s control over it. He was convinced the whole boom was about to snap.
He continued helplessly swinging back and forth as Tsibliyev moved the pole across the face of the station. Then, at one point, Linenger turned his head and realized he was about to crash into a sharp-edged solar array.
“Vasily, stop!” he said.
The commander stopped moving the pole, but his momentum brought Linenger, by his estimate, within six inches of the array.
He exhaled.
It was at roughly this point, with his knees squeezed around a vibrating steel pole dangling out in open space, swaying crazily across a field of knife-edged machinery, that the slapdash nature of the entire Russian EVA process struck Linenger with the force of a two-by-four.
Linenger later told his debriefers:
‘It’s risk upon risk is what you start feeling. When you go out the hatch and see C-clamps, and then you get on the end of the arm that’s [bending], you don’t have a lot of confidence that that thing’s not going to break either… You’ve got a lot of risk on your mind, and you really have to compartmentalize it all the way and do the job. And I was surprised I was able to do that. I was able to do that, and I’m not sure I was trained to do that. But I would suspect some people would not be able to do that.”
Linenger realized how little he really knew in advance about this space walk:
There’s nothing orchestrated at all about the EVA. It was winging it, basically, the whole time. It’s nothing like the shuttle, where you say, “Okay, there’s going to be a handhold here, and then you go from there, and you go to point B.”
Eventually, despite all the fits and starts, Linenger landed on the end of Kristall, just beside the docking port used by the shuttle. For the first time since leaving the hatch, he was able to anchor his feet under a rail, grab another rail with his hands, and feel steady. The handholds were solid there. He secured the Strela arm and waited for Tsibliyev to shimmy across it, which the Russian accomplished with no trouble. They began connecting the OPM to the outer hull at 10:14. They had been outside for just over an hour.
From his vantage point inside the station, Lazutkin tried his best to videotape the EVA, but the windows were small and didn’t give him the chance to film much. Out at the end of Kristall, painted orange to stand out against the gray-streaked station, Tsibliyev and Linenger looked like thick white tadpoles, slowly spinning this way and that, crawling all around the OPM, a fat egg floating in space. Each man appeared stiff and lifeless, arms and legs and trunks rotating as one, like plastic action figures in the hands of some giant cosmic child.
And then, just as Linenger thought he was beginning to master the endless sensation of falling, night fell. Outside Mir there was nothing subtle about the movement from day to night. One second the area around the two spacewalkers was lit as if by spotlight. The next moment the lights winked out, and they were engulfed by the darkest night Linenger had ever experienced. He wrote in a letter to his son:
Blackness, not merely dark, but absolute black. You see nothing. Nothing. You grip the handhold ever more tightly. You convince yourself that it is okay to be falling, alone, nowhere, in the blackness. You loosen your grip. Your eyes adjust, and you can make out forms. Another human being silhouetted against the heavens.
