guessed that maybe one of the cosmonauts had hit his thumb with a hammer.
“The Progress,” Aleksandr said quietly. “It hit the station. The pressure’s going down.”
Zimmerman went numb. This was not something a 29-year-old MOD assistant was accustomed to hearing.
“Wait, Vasya, what are you doing now?” Nikiforov asked.
“We are getting ready to leave. The pressure is already at 690. It continues to drop.”
“Can you switch on any blowers?”
“I think we can.”
“Open all existing oxygen tanks.”
“Sasha,” Tsibliyev hollered to Lazutkin, “have you closed the hatch?”
Lazutkin’s reply was drowned out as the station’s master alarm continued braying.
“Vasya,” said Solovyov, “what are you doing now?”
“DSD has turned on. We managed to close the hatch to module O.” This was wishful thinking: as Tsibliyev spoke, Lazutkin still hadn’t cleared the last cable from the hatch. DSD was a depressurization sensor.
“Module O. Has [the Progress] run into module O?”
“Yes, it hit module O.”
“Is the hatch closed right now?”
“Sasha is closing it right now.”
“What’s happening with the pressure?”
“DSD turned on when pressure dropped down to 690.”
Solovyov interjected. “Can you pass through [the node] right now? We should have extra [oxygen] tanks somewhere in TSO.”
“I know that,” said Tsibliyev. TSO refers to the air lock at the end of the Kvant 2 module.
Solovyov’s call for Tsibliyev to retrieve one of the station’s pumpkin-size oxygen cylinders was a standard response to depressurization scenarios in both Russian and American simulations; until this moment it had never been tried in an actual crisis. Releasing oxygen into the Mir’s atmosphere, Zimmerman realized, meant Solovyov had decided to begin “feeding the leak” – that is, replacing air that had already begun to whistle through whatever hole the Progress had poked in the hull of the Spektr module. Feeding the leak wouldn’t save the station, but it should give the crew precious extra minutes. How many depended on how fast the station was losing air.
“So open them up,” Solovyov ordered.
“I [will start] doing that right now. I am taking off the ears” – the headphones – “and am taking off to do that.”
“But someone has to stay here to maintain the connection!” Solovyov pleaded.
“Then I can’t make it.”
Tsibliyev did it anyway. Ripping off his headphones, he left his post, turned, and swam out over the command console and into the node.
“Guys?” Solovyov asked. “Someone pick up!”
There was no answer.
“Sasha?”
No answer.
“They have left… Guys? Someone respond.”
Lazutkin wouldn’t cut the power cable. Again he and Foale plunged down into the darkened morass of loose cords and equipment and lids and seals that lined the node walls. Somewhere in the chamber’s dim recesses, Lazutkin believed there must be a plug for the power cable. Foale ripped aside cable bundles and ran his hands over the walls. Lazutkin craned his head, looking, looking.
There. Lazutkin pulled at the power cable and followed it to a plug inside Spektr. With one furious yank, he ripped it from the wall.
Immediately Foale and Lazutkin turned to confront Spektr’s inner hatch. Lazutkin reached into the module and pulled on the hatch to close it.
It wouldn’t budge.
Both men instantly saw the problem. With the pressure dropping inside Spektr, all the air inside the station was rushing past them, seeking to escape through the unseen breach into open space. It was as if they were trying to close an open door while an invisible river surged through it. Lazutkin realized he could slip into Spektr and push from the inside, but then he would be trapped within the sealed module. He would die quickly, a hero of the motherland, but Sasha Lazutkin wasn’t ready to die yet.
Again he and Foale tugged at the hatch, straining to pull it closed.
It wouldn’t budge. Nothing they did would make it move a single inch.
They couldn’t close the hatch because of the air rushing through it. Tsibliyev dashed into Kvant 2 to get an oxygen cylinder. He turned it on and the pressure began to go up.
The hatch wouldn’t shut.
Its outer surface was smooth, with no easy handholds. Neither Foale nor Lazutkin could risk slipping his hands around the hatch’s outer edge, for fear of losing a finger.
“The lid! Let’s get a lid!” Lazutkin urged.
Foale realized that with the inside hatch unable to close, they would have to find a hatch cover to push onto the module’s open mouth from the outside.
Each of the four modules attached to the node originally came with a circular lid, vaguely resembling a garbage can lid, which sealed the hatch from the outside. All four of the lids were now strapped to spots on the node walls. They came in two sizes, heavy and light. Lazutkin reached for a heavy lid, but it was tied down by a half-dozen cloth strips, each of which, he realized, he would have to slash to free the hatch cover underneath. He simply didn’t have enough time to cut all the strips.
Instead Lazutkin reached for one of the lighter covers. It was secured to the node wall by a pair of cloth straps, both of which the slim Russian quickly severed with the knife.
Together both men lifted the lid and set it over the open hatch. The lid was originally held in place by a series of hooks spaced evenly around the hatch’s outer edges, and Lazutkin thought they would have to work this mechanism to seal the hatch. But the moment the two men affixed the cover to the open hatch, the pressure differential that foiled their earlier efforts now worked in their favor. The lid was sucked tightly into place.
Lazutkin wasn’t satisfied. He told Foale to support the hatch cover while he found the tool he needed to work the closing mechanism.
“Vasya,” Solovyov said, “what hatch are they closing in module O? The one that needs to be pushed out or pulled in?”
“Which one are you closing?” Tsibliyev yelled over at Lazutkin.
Lazutkin said something inaudible.
“The one that will be pushed toward the module,” said Tsibliyev.
“You mean the one that is part of the main module.”
“It’s like a lid that will be pressed on.”
“Understood. So you are putting on the lid? Do you have some knife? Can you unplug the cables?”
“Yes, we have closed it and with that the light indicating depressurization has turned off.”
At the NASA console Keith Zimmerman breathed a tiny sign of relief. This was the first good news he had heard. He scanned the telemetry on his screen, paying close attention to the pressure levels. If the damage was limited to Spektr, and Spektr’s hatch had been firmly sealed, the pressure should hold steady.
At 12:21 the Progress was over 300m away orbiting the station. The pressure was slowly coming up. Mission Control’s systems indicated that Mir was drifting. They asked: “What’s happening with SUD right now? Is it in the ‘indication’ mode?”
SUD referred to the station’s motion-control system; if it had entered indication mode, Mir was in free drift and thus unable to keep the solar arrays toward the sun.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll leave it.”
With the station in free drift, its remaining solar arrays were unable to track the sun and thus generate power. With no new power coming into the system, the existing onboard systems would slowly begin to drain what
