Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

“Yes, yes.”

“You can take vitaron. Two capsules.”

“Okay.”

“You can also [take] carbolen. If you have headache symptoms and so on.”

The doctors congratulated Korzun and the entire crew for a job well done and urged them to sleep. Everyone tried. No one slept soundly.

The Soyuz which had brought MIR 23 was docked at the node. During the fire, the crew of MIR 22 had been cut off from their escape craft which was docked at the Kvant.

The fire had happened while they were out of communication – Linenger thought it lasted about 14 minutes; TsUP said it was a “microfire” which had only lasted 90 seconds.

Twelve hours later they were still wearing their 3M masks.

On 4 March the supply vessel Progress M-33 was due. The Progress had been described as an eight-ton bumblebee with two solar arrays like wings. Tsibliyev manned the TORU with the Kurs radar providing information about the Progress’s range and speed. Ground control released the Progress 7km away from Mir; at the speed it was moving it would take 15 minutes to get to Mir. Linenger was watching from Kristall. When the Progress was 5km away the camera on board should have activated but it failed to give a picture. Tsibliyev remembered:

It was the most uncomfortable [time]. I felt as if I was sitting in a car, but I couldn’t see anything from the car, and I knew there was this huge truck out there bearing down on me. You don’t know if it’s going to hit you or miss you. It’s like a torpedo, and you’re in a sub.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev began asking the others. “Do you see it yet?”

“No,” said Lazutkin, peering out the big base block window behind the commander.

“No, nothing,” Linenger said over the intercom. There are three windows in Kristall, and he was floating between all three, scanning space for any sign of the Progress.

They waited.

“Do you see it?” Tsibliyev shouted a few moments later.

“No, I don’t see it,” Linenger breathed over the intercom. Lazutkin, floating at the base block window, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

Several moments passed.

“Do you see it?” Tsibliyev asked again.

“I don’t see anything,” Linenger replied, hurriedly shuttling between his portals.

Static filled the Sony monitor. Linenger could tell from the tone of Tsibliyev’s voice the Russian was growing anxious. More time went by. Somewhere out there a fully loaded spaceship was bearing down on them.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev demanded. He turned to Lazutkin. “What should I do?”

Lazutkin had no advice.

They waited.

At the two-minute point, Tsibliyev began to sweat.

“Do you see it?” he shouted again.

“No, I don’t see it,” Linenger said. Lazutkin concurred. “Nothing,” he said.

“Find it!” Tsibliyev ordered. “Find it!”

After several more moments, during which he floated back and forth between Kristall’s three portals peering into the inky blackness of space, Linenger heard Lazutkin’s voice over the intercom. It was filled with tension.

“Jerry, get back in base block quick,” he said.

Lazutkin had spotted the Progress. Until this point Mir’s massive solar arrays had blocked his line of sight. But now he saw the ship approaching fast, slightly below the station. From his vantage point in base block, it appeared to be heading for an imminent collision.

“I see it!” Lazutkin said.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev asked.

“It’s close!” Lazutkin replied.

This was as technical as Lazutkin’s response got. He remembered later: “I saw it in full size. All the solar arrays, the antennae, everything. That’s when I told Jerry to go to Soyuz.”

Linenger propelled himself down the length of Kristall as quickly as he could. Reaching the node, he saw Tsibliyev sitting at the console, jerking at the TORU joysticks. The Sony monitor still showed nothing but snow.

“What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted.

Lazutkin turned to Linenger. “Get in the spacecraft,” he said quickly. “Get ready to evacuate.”

As Linenger turned, he saw Tsibliyev furiously manipulating the TORU joysticks. He realized the Russian was attempting to fly Progress blind. Swiftly, Linenger folded himself into the Soyuz capsule and immediately began pulling out the various cables and ventilation tubes that connected the craft to Mir. Floating up into the node, he saw Tsibliyev still in base block, sitting before the monitor. He appeared to be on the verge of panic.

“What’s it doing?” the Russian shouted.

Lazutkin’s reply was unclear. Crouched at the mouth of the Soyuz, grabbing and disconnecting cables as fast as he could, Linenger glanced over his shoulder to see Tsibliyev jump back from the console and check the portal himself. Then he sprang back to the monitor and pulled at the black joysticks once more.

“What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted at Lazutkin.

At TsUP the NASA ground team were watching the picture from the camera on board the Progress.

Tony Sang and his team crowded around the monitors in the NASA suite to watch Tsibliyev redock the Progress. Sang wasn’t especially worried about the maneuver. From conversations with Viktor Blagov he understood – incorrectly – that the Russians had handled these kinds of long-distance manual dockings on several previous occasions with no problem.

In front of him, Sang’s monitor showed video being shot by the camera aboard Progress M-33. Gone were the overlaying targeting sights that they normally would see; the sights had been unavailable since communication with the Altair Satellite was cut off. Still, the moment the image from Progress flickered onto his monitor, Sang realized something was amiss.

“This doesn’t look right,” he said.

The screen should show Mir floating in space as the Progress approached. Instead the monitor in NASA’s office showed Earth in the distance. There was no sign of the station.

“This doesn’t look like any Progress docking I’ve seen before,” Sang mused aloud.

As the minutes tick by, Sang and his group kept waiting for Mir to come into view.

“Where is it?” someone said.

After about ten minutes, with no sighting of Mir, the picture winked out. Several moments after that, as Mir once again came into range of a Russian ground station. Tsibliyev’s voice came over the comm. Sang and Tom Marshburn watched intently as one of their interpreters, a temporary replacement they didn’t know well, busily scribbled down what the commander was saying. As usual they had no sense of the words or even the tone of the cosmonaut’s message.

“The commander is really excited,” the interpreter said.

“What do you mean?” asked Marshburn.

“I don’t know, but he’s really, really excited,” the interpreter replied. “Something’s going on.”

New to the job, and to the technical terms Tsibliyev was using, the replacement interpreter was unable to decipher precisely what had happened. Sang realized Tsibliyev was angrily complaining about some kind of malfunction on his screen; apparently it wasn’t working. Curious, Sang and Marshburn hustled down to the floor to find out what was going on.

The Progress missed.

Barely fifteen seconds before impact, as Linenger scrunched himself into the Soyuz to prepare for emergency evacuation, Tsibliyev’s screen suddenly activated, and he realized the Progress would not hit the station. The screen, broadcasting from the camera aboard the Progress, showed Mir uncomfortably large and close. But from this vantage point Tsibliyev saw the Progress would pass underneath the station, narrowly avoiding a collision.