Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

Crouching by the base block window, Lazutkin watched the ship sail by harmlessly. He guessed the distance at two hundred meters or less.

Emerging into the node, Linenger saw Tsibliyev dramatically sag in relief. All the pent-up energy in the commander’s shoulders seemed to drain from his body as he leant heavily on the TORU controls. For the longest time no one said anything.

Tony Sang’s interpreter was right. Tsibliyev was angry.

“I will repeat,” the commander said at the beginning of the pass. “We watched it visually… There was no picture for a long time. At 10:19 it appeared… It started moving away, under us. We were close to it. We were like 200, 220 meters close to it, judging by its size… We managed to apply the brakes. The speed was around two meters [per second], and then it started moving away very fast. And that’s the last thing that we saw. Now there is no picture again… We couldn’t observe anything for a long time. There was no picture.”

Vladimir Solovyov himself got on the comm. “Did you have control of it?”

“I started braking and switching off the angle mechanisms. It passed by at a very high speed. It wasn’t possible to see where to go. I touched the handles intuitively. We didn’t collide with… There was no picture. And there is no picture now. And it’s hard to say how to control it. Only when we started braking, a picture appeared.”

For the moment, the TsUP was primarily concerned with locating the errant spacecraft. “[It’s] somewhere underneath,” the comm officer said.

“But I don’t have anything,” Tsibliyev said. “Nothing can be seen. Just the mist.”

“Read from the screen,” the comm officer suggested.

“I can’t see anything anyway,” Tsibliyev snapped. “It’s not us. We saw through the window that it started moving to the side of [base block].”

The rest of the comm pass was spent attempting to find the Progress. After signing off, Tsibliyev turned to Linenger and Lazutkin and launched into a lengthy tirade directed at the TsUP’s incompetence: “Jerry, what was I supposed to do? What could I do? The screen shows nothing! Nothing! What could I do?” It took a while for thecommander to settledown, andwhen hedid he heaved a long sigh.

“Guys,” he said, “I never want to do that again.”

Lazutkin was sent to the Elektron unit which generated their oxygen supply – there were two but one was not working as there was an air bubble blocking its electrolysis canal. Consequently he had to use their remaining Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator and had to insert the same type of cylinder which had burst into flame. It took six attempts to get the cylinder to engage but it did not catch fire.

On 2 April there was a malfunction in the station’s coolant system. TsUP detected a drop in pressure in the pipe carrying coolant to the Vozdukh CO 2removal system, the second leak of this type.

It was getting very hot in the Kvant 2 module so TsUP sent commands to reorient the station to keep the the Kvant 2 module out of direct sunlight. Unfortunately the reorientation put the base block in direct sunlight causing the temperature to rise to 90°. They found the corroded joint which was leaking in Kvant near the docking assembly. The coolant was a type of anti-freeze which gave off toxic fumes so they had to switch off the CO 2removal system to reach the leaking joint. Linenger refused to help with repairs or cleaning up operations. The Russian psychologist at Ground Control, “Steve” Bogdashevsky, was concerned that the two Russians were becoming exhausted and stressed:

“We were first alarmed by the fire. Usually it takes a year or more to fully relieve the stress after something like this. It’s scary, and you could see it. The fear was in them. It really changes a person’s behavior. They became more cautious. They didn’t feel as relaxed. We started picking up nuances we didn’t pick up before. They became more demanding to the ground. For instance, [if] Vasily had a question the ground said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And they became irritated. After the failed docking, it became clear to us that the psychological state of the cosmonauts was becoming worse. I wrote a paper with an unfavorable psychological prognosis, and I called for everybody’s attention to change their attitude toward the crew. But the attitude remained the same. The attitude can be characterized as a sweat-sucking system. [The TsUP] just makes them work harder and harder.”

Bogdashevsky’s first warnings to the TsUP came in a report written on March 23. His preliminary diagnosis for both Tsibliyev and Lazutkin was exhaustion. Further, he felt Tsibliyev was suffering from something he called “ostheno-neurotic syndrome,” a related condition. “When a person is osthetic,” Bogdashevsky explains, “he gets tired faster and gets irritated. It depends on the person, the mind. One person can get depressed. Another person, his blood pressure changes. It depends.” In Tsibliyev’s case, it had led to increasing irritation, both at the ground and at Linenger.

Linenger and Tsibliyev were scheduled to do an EVA together, the purpose of which was to set up a piece of equipment called the Optical Properties Monitor (OPM) on the end of the Kristall module. The OPM was the size of a suitcase. Considerable friction had built up between Linenger and Tsibliyev which affected their preparation. As part of their preparation astronauts and cosmonauts usually discussed what they were going to do in detail. Linenger and Tsibliyev didn’t.

They were going to leave the station through the airlock which had been damaged in 1990. The set of clamps which had been used to close the hatch was still there. Burrough:

It was this set of clamps that Linenger and Tsibliyev were staring at uneasily seven years later. To his relief, the commander opened the hatch without incident and crawled outside onto an adjoining ladder just after nine o’clock. Linenger began to follow. Outside the sun was rising. The Russians had planned the EVA at sunrise so as to get the longest period of light. But because of that, Linenger’s first view of space was straight into the blazing sun.

Linenger told his post-flight debriefing session:

“The first view I got was just blinding rays coming at me. Even with my gold visor down, it was just blinding. [I] was basically unable to see for the first three or four minutes going out the hatch.”

Once his eyes cleared the situation got worse. He exited the airlock. Then he climbed out onto a horizontal ladder that stretched out along the side of the module into the darkness. Trying to get his bearings, he was suddenly hit by an overwhelming sense that he was falling, as if from a cliff. As he clamped his tethers onto the handrail, he fought back a wave of panic and tightened his grip on the ladder. But he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was plummeting through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour. His mind raced: You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re not going to fall. The bottom is way far away.

And now a second, even more intense feeling washed over him: he was not just plunging off a cliff. The entire cliff was crumbling away.

Linenger told his debriefers:

“It wasn’t just me falling, but everything was falling, which gave [me] an even more unsettling feeling. So, it was like you had to overcome forty years or whatever of life experiences that [you] don’t let go when everything falls. It was a very strong, almost overwhelming sensation that you just had to control. And I was able to control it, and I was glad I was able to control it. But I could see where it could have put me over the edge.”