Stuart Kaminsky: Fall of a Cosmonaut

The MIR space station was launched in February of 1986. It followed the Russian space programs seven smaller manned space stations, beginning with Salyut I, launched in 1971, which orbited the earth for six months.

Mir, which means “peace,” is forty-three feet long and fourteen feet wide. It has ninety-eight foot-long energy-generating solar panels. Mir can accommodate six cosmonauts for short stays and three for longer periods. Fifteen months is considered the maximum time for a cosmonaut to remain in space.

Mir has six docking ports, and when most or all are in use the attached units make Mir look like a metallic dragonfly being attacked by space parasites.

Mir has four areas-a docking compartment, living quarters, a work area, and a propulsion chamber. The docking compartment houses television equipment, the electrical-power supply system, and five of the six ports.

In the living space are two small sleeping cabins and a common area with dining facilities and exercise equipment, plus a toilet, sink, and a water-recycling system.

The work compartment contains the main navigational, communications, and power-control systems. Attached to the sides of this compartment are two solar panels that provide Mir ’s electricity.

Space suits are needed only in the propulsion compartment, which is not pressurized. This compartment has rocket motors, a fuel supply, a heating system, and the sixth docking port, used only for unpiloted refueling missions. Outside this compartment are the antennae for all communication with the earth.

In the docked modules are an observatory with x-ray and gamma-ray telescopes. Another module, with an air-lock system, is used for repairs outside the station. A third module is used for scientific equipment and as a docking port for heavy spacecraft. Two more modules with various functions complete Mir.

Mir is a marvel of technology, the pride of Russian science, and for the last five years of its existence it has been rapidly decaying and experiencing a series of disasters-some small, some large, and at least one that began as …

Tsimion Vladovka sat before the console in front of the axial docking port, wondering if dreams were different in outer space. He pressed the buttons on the panel in front of him and watched the lists and numbers scroll by, certain that if something was wrong the automatic part of his mind would notice and nudge him into action and out of the memory of his dream.

Tsimion had been on the Mir space station for eight months. Early in his stay he had decided that there were three things about the journey around the earth to nowhere that he did not like.

First, he did not like the loud squawk of the alarm that woke the cosmonauts each morning and blared when there was a problem or potential problem. At first he had slept just below the level of consciousness, strapped in to keep from floating about the cabin, slept without dreams, dreading that blare. Now he had learned to anticipate it, check his watch, unstrap himself, and float past whoever might be sleeping just below him. Long before the others awoke, Tsimion was drifting weightlessly about the communal cabin, eating alone at the work and dining table. At forty-two, he was the oldest of the three cosmonauts on board the space station. If he took after his father, whom he already resembled, he would soon be white haired. At first, Tsimion had routinely shaved carefully, finding even the smallest hair on his throat, cheekbones, and beneath his ears. His beard was dark and grew quickly. Lately, he had begun to shave just enough so that there would be no questions from ground control about his appearance. There was a slightly Asian look about his face, a look of eastern Russia and the farming village in which he was born, that weightlessness somehow accented. His family went back at least a thousand years in that village not far from St. Petersburg, inbreeding with other potato-farming families till everyone in the town looked as if he or she had been cloned from the same original, with more than a touch of the Mongols who had long ago raided and raped their way through the plains.

When he brushed his teeth, Tsimion had to remind himself to keep his mouth closed tightly so that the toothpaste would not drift about the cabin. Even with frequent warnings and reminders it was inevitable that food particles would get away. It was routine for the cosmonauts to gather in stray floating bits as they came upon them and dispose of them in safe boxes. Washing was not so bad, but it had its own problems. Globules of water clung to the skin and had to be coaxed with a sponge to do their job. Capturing a fleeing globule of water in a plastic bag was a daily game.

“You sound tired, Vladovka,” Mikhail Stoltz had said once, his voice deep with years of smoking Turkish cigarettes. “ Kahk dyehlah, ‘how are you?’”

“ Pryeekrahsnay, ‘fine,’” Tsimion had answered.

Tsimion had wondered at first why Stoltz, who was head of security at the Star City cosmonaut training center twenty miles outside of Moscow, had recently begun communicating with Mir. There was no point in asking and it wasn’t Tsimion’s concern. If there were a security problem on the space station, Tsimion was reasonably certain which of the other cosmonauts might be involved.

“I have been working on the fungus experiments,” Tsimion had said. “I lost track of time.”

“That is what your watch is for,” Stoltz had said with a laugh, a laugh patently false and carrying a hint of warning.

Their brief daily conversations, both men knew, were monitored by countries around the world, but they were most concerned with convincing the Americans that these communications were light and confident. There were breaks in radio contact with space control in Karolyov and Star City resulting from Mir being on the opposite side of the earth from Russia. In fact, acceptable radio contact lasted only minutes a day. Though he did nothing different from his normal routine during these breaks of contact, Tsimion looked forward to them precisely because they isolated him and the others from all earthly control.

The second thing that Tsimion disliked about his mission was his company. It was natural, he knew, that in such confines people would begin to get on each other’s nerves. They had all been taught that, all been trained in techniques of dealing with each other. Tsimion had spent much of his free time in the Spektr module, sending long e-mails to his wife at the Star City cosmonaut training center. He knew the correspondence was being monitored and analyzed by psychologists and military officers, and so he kept his innermost thoughts to himself. For much of his time, Tsimion had taken to keeping a journal and recording his dreams. The journal was a neat, thick, blank-paged book with a hard cover. He had, when he first began keeping it, asked the others aboard Mir about their dreams. Early on they had cooperated. The most cooperative had been the American, Tufts. Tufts’s Russian was grammatically correct but heavily accented. Tsimion’s English was no better. The two had become friends and had once been chastised by Vladimir Kinotskin for playing catch in the communal room with a ball of rolled aluminum foil that floated wildly across the small area.