anything. Moving with the fury of a man in hand-to-hand combat, Lazutkin grabbed the giant, worm-like ventilation tube and tore it in half. Wordlessly he seized cable after cable, furiously rending each one at its connection point. Foale watched in silence.
It took Lazutkin barely a minute to disconnect all the cables. Finally only one remained. It was the PVC tube, which channelled condensate water from the Soyuz into the station’s main water tanks. Lazutkin could not separate it with his hands. He needed a tool.
A wrench. They needed a wrench. Lazutkin looked frantically for one all around the node, which was lined with spare hatches and tools and equipment. He and Foale spent nearly a minute in search of a wrench before Lazutkin found one, floating by a blue thread. He handed it to Foale and showed him how to unfasten the PVC tube. Foale retreated into the Soyuz, applied the wrench, and began turning as fast as he could.
When he was certain Foale knew how to unfasten the PVC tube, Lazutkin turned toward the entrance to the Spektr module. Foale, while saying nothing aloud, remained convinced the leak was in base block or Kvant. Lazutkin didn’t have to guess. He had seen the Progress lodged against the Spektr module’s solar array. He assumed that whatever breach the hull had suffered, it almost certainly occurred in Spektr. Lazutkin pushed off from the Soyuz entrance, arced across the node, and shimmied into Spektr.
Diving head first into the module, he immediately heard an angry hissing noise from somewhere below and to his left. It was, he knew, the sound of air escaping into space. His heart sank. At this moment, Sasha Lazutkin was certain they were all about to die.
On Mir the hatchways between the modules were 3 feet in diameter. There were cables running through them so that they couldn’t be closed without cutting or removing the cables.
Lazutkin realized immediately that in order to save the station, he had to somehow seal off Spektr. Like all the other hatchways, it was lined with wrapped packets of thin white and gray cables, 18 cables in all, plus a giant worm-like ventilation tube.
A knife, Lazutkin thought: I’ve got to find a knife to cut the cables. While Foale remained inside the Soyuz, finishing off the PVC tube, Lazutkin soared back through the node and dived headfirst into base block, where he saw Tsibliyev poised to begin talking to the ground. Vaulting over the commander’s head, Lazutkin shot down the length of base block, past the dinner table, and into the mouth of Kvant. He remembered a large pair of scissors he had stowed alongside one of the panels, but when he reached the panel, he was heartsick: the scissors weren’t there. Then he saw a tiny, four-inch knife – “better to cut butter with than cables,” as Lazutkin remembered it. Normally he used the blade to peel the insulation off cables that needed to be rewired.
Lazutkin grabbed the knife and flew back down to the node. Sticking his upper body into Spektr, he grabbed a bundle of cables and instantly realized his plan wouldn’t work: the cables were too thick to be cut with his little blade. Each of the bundles was fitted into one of dozens of connectors that lined the inside of the hatch. Frantically Lazutkin began grabbing the cable bundles one after another, unscrewing their connections and tossing the loose ends aside, to float in the air.
After a moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, where he had finally disconnected the PVC tube, just as Lazutkin finished ripping apart the first few cables. Foale was immediately surprised to see Lazutkin working at the mouth of Spektr. Still believing the leak was somewhere back in base block or Kvant, he was convinced that Lazutkin was isolating the wrong part of the station. If Foale was correct, sealing off Spektr would be a disastrous move. It would actually reduce the station’s air supply, thereby causing Mir’s remaining atmosphere to rush out of the breach even faster.
Foale remembered:
“I was still very concerned we were isolating the wrong place. I was not going to stop him physically – yet. But that was my next thought: Should I try and stop him?”
Burrough:
Instead, intimidated by the sheer fury with which Lazutkin was tearing at the cables, Foale floated by and watched. As Lazutkin rended each line, its loose end floated out into the node – “eighteen snakes floating around, like the head of Medusa,” Foale recalled. Foale began grabbing the loose lines and binding them with rubber bands he found in the node. Finally, he said something.
“Why are we closing off Spektr? It’s the wrong module to close off. If we’re gonna do a leak-isolation thing, we have to start with Kvant 2.”
Foale was about to say more, when Lazutkin cut him off.
“Michael,” he said, “I saw it hit Spektr.”
And with that Foale at last fathomed Lazutkin’s urgency: seal Spektr, and they save the station.
It took almost three minutes for Lazutkin to tear apart fifteen of the eighteen cables. The remaining three cables didn’t have any visible connection points. They were solid and unbreakable. Lazutkin thought of the knife. He retrieved it from his pocket and slashed a thin data cable for one of the NASA experiments. The next moment he slashed a leftover French data cable from one of the Euro-Mir missions. One cable remained. One cable whose removal would allow them to seal the hatch and save the station.
But Lazutkin received a rude shock when he began sawing into the last and thickest of the three cables. Sparks flew up into his face. It was a power cable.
Foale saw a frightened look cross the Russian’s face.
“Sasha, go ahead!” Foale urged. “Cut it!” A beat. “Cut it!”
But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cut it.
At the moment the Progress struck the station, Mir was just coming into communications range of TsUP. Burrough:
It was at this point that Tsibliyev, still floating anxiously at the command center in base block, heard the TsUP hailing him. Nikolai Nikiforov, the shift flight director, was at the command console in the TsUP. Vladimir Solovyov stood out of sight in a separate control room used for Progress operations. There was static, and for a moment Tsibliyev’s words could not be heard.
“Siriuses!” Nikiforov shouted. “Siriuses!”
Suddenly Tsibliyev’s voice broke through the static. “Yes, yes, we copy! There was no braking. There was no braking. It just stalled. I didn’t manage to turn the ship away. Everything was going on fine, but then, God knows why, it started to accelerate and run into module O, damaged the solar panel. It started to [accelerate], then the station got depressurized. Right now the pressure inside the station is at 700.”
Sirius was Mir’s codename. Module O was Spektr.
Soloyov, immediately realizing what had happened, got on comm. Burrough:
“Guys, where are you now?”
“We are getting into the [Soyuz]…”
Chaos broke out for several moments on the floor of the TsUP as Solovyov and the other controllers tried to determine exactly what was happening aboard the station. The comm broke up for a moment.
“Copy, damn it!” Solovyov barked.
“Oh, hell,” Tsibliyev blurted out. “We don’t know where the leak is.”
“Can you close any hatch?” interjected Nikiforov.
“We can’t close anything,” Tsibliyev said hurriedly. “Here everything is so screwed up that we can’t close anything.”
As Tsibliyev’s words crackled over the auditorium loudspeakers, Keith Zimmerman couldn’t understand anything the commander was saying: he spoke very little Russian. Then, suddenly, his interpreter said, “They hit something.”
Zimmerman wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?” he said. From the interpreter’s even tone of voice, he
