They flicked on their visor lights. Russian EVA protocols called for them to stop working during night passes, unless necessary. Linenger, halting work on the OPM hookup, stood absolutely still. There in the dark he once again began to feel disoriented. Slowly, inch by inch, the sensation of falling was somehow changing – to what, he wasn’t immediately sure. Then, ever so slowly, he began to feel as if he was falling forward. As the minutes ticked by, he felt as if he was slowly being stood on his head. There in the pitch black of space, still feeling as if he was falling off a cliff, he began to fight the almost uncontrollable urge to stand upright. His head told him he was being ridiculous. There is no “upright” in space. But his emotions told him otherwise. Bit by bit, space was slowly standing him upside down.
Finally, after a half hour spent tumbling forward, the sun returned and Linenger now faced the awkward feeling that he had been turned upside down. He forced himself to continue. Eventually they finished installing the OPM and climbed back across the Strela to the outer hull of Kvant 2. There Linenger detached the debris-catching experiment, called the Particle Impact Experiment (PIE), and stuck it under one arm. For Linenger one final rush of anxiety came as they finished. He was standing in the middle of Kvant 2’s maze of hulking solar arrays, sensors, and boxy experiments with no clear path back to the airlock. In fact, he realized, he had no idea where the airlock was. He saw what he thought might be a promising path but immediately found his way blocked by a large box. Linenger asked:
“Vasily, how can I get over this experiment over here?”
Tsibliyev replied:
“It’s going to be tough. I’m going to start taking stuff back into the airlock. See you inside.”
Linenger was dumbfounded. He had no idea which way the airlock was, and Tsibliyev clearly had no intention of showing him the way. He watched as the commander pushed off from where he had been tethered, and began turning his head, apparently in search of the airlock. It dawned on Linenger that the Russian didn’t know where he was going either. Linenger remembered:
I could tell he had no clue.
Surrounded by solar arrays and a maze of experiments, Linenger searched for something – anything – to orient himself. After several moments he spotted a window, made his way carefully toward it, peered inside, and saw the familiar confines of Kvant 2. Getting his orientation, he realized Tsibliyev was going the wrong way. He said:
“Vasily, airlock’s that way. See you inside.”
Linenger gingerly crawled toward the airlock and within minutes joined Tsibliyev inside. They had been outside the station for five hours. Carefully closing the hatch behind them, Linenger heaved a giant sigh of relief. Later, when they had wriggled out of their spacesuits, Lazutkin cooked them a meal. The next day Linenger triumphantly e-mailed Sang:
“EVA pretty much flawless.”
The remaining three weeks of Linenger’s stay abroad Mir were spent finishing experiments, packing up and cleaning the station. On 17 May Atlantis arrived carrying Linenger’s replacement, Mike Foale.
Foale was the son of a Royal Air Force pilot who had been born and educated in the United Kingdom but was entitled to US citizenship because his mother was an American. He had an MA in Astrophysics and had worked for NASA in shuttle payload at Mission Control. He had been accepted as an astronaut candidate at his third attempt in 1987 and flew three shuttle missions between 1992 and 1995. When he arrived he was 40 and had worked very hard at learning Russian. He was scrupulous in becoming part of the crew’s routine by attending meals and communications sessions. Lazutkin remembered:
“We noticed these little things. What was different about Mike was he started studying everything right away. He said, ‘Show me how everything works.’ And we gave him things to do. He asked all the right questions. Mike amazed us by mastering [systems] theory sometimes better than we knew it. He was like a child, and he was growing, and he grew into a real cosmonaut engineer.”
Tsibliyev recalled:
“When Michael first came on the station, the three of us were sitting around the table, and Michael said, ‘I came here to make you happy with me.’ He didn’t say he came to make himself happy. He came to make us happy. The fact that he integrated into the crew was because of these qualities.”
There was another coolant leak. Lazutkin found it in a crack in a pipe in Kvant. When Tsibliyev got a globule of coolant full in the face it took him three days to recover. By this time he was already tired and stressed.
An unmanned Progress supply vessel crashes into Mir
On 25 June a Progress was due. They were to repeat the docking test, taking over control of the supply vessel from 7km out, but this time they would be out of communication with TsUP until the Progress was 50m from Mir. If a docking was aborted while the Progress was over 400m away it would miss Mir. Within that distance no one knew what would happen. TsUP told Tsibliyev that the Progress was approaching on schedule. This time the camera on the Progress worked but the automatic docking system (BPS) did not. The BPS signalled that the Progress was ready to fire its thrusters but 17 minutes from docking there was no receipt signal. Tsibliyev switched to manual docking using the TORU and sent Foale to Kvant to check the distance using a laser range finder. The Kurs radar which could provide that information had been automatically switched off. There was a possibility that this had caused failure of the camera on board the Progress. At this point they couldn’t see the Progress either on screen or through a window, although they estimated it was only 2.5km out.
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
