Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

The disorientation was paralyzing. There was no up, no down, no side. There was only three-dimensional space. It was an entirely different sensation from spacewalking on the shuttle, where the astronauts were surrounded on three sides by a cargo bay. And it felt nothing – nothing – like the Star City pool. Linenger was an ant on the side of a falling apple, hurtling through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour, acutely aware what would happen if his Russian-made tethers broke. As he clung to the thin railing, he tried not to think about the handrail on Kvant that came apart during a cosmonaut’s spacewalk in the early days of Mir. Loose bolts, the Russians said.

It was Linenger’s first EVA. As the two men clung to the ladder, Tsibliyev said:

“Jerry, just wait, I’ll go first.”

The Russian stopped for a second to admire the view. It was Tsibliyev’s sixth EVA – he had done five with Serebrov in 1993. He remembered:

“There is suddenly this huge planet below you. Inside the station, you cannot see it, only parts of it. When you get out, you really see it, the whole thing, it’s so unusual, so dramatic, so emotional, you have to be a little scared.”

With a final glance downward, Tsibliyev surged forward in search of the spot to place a small radiation dosimeter, the first of several tasks on their list that day.

For the longest time Linenger remained frozen. Nothing was familiar. Nothing looked as it did in the swimming pool at Star City. And everything was falling. Slowly he inched along the handrail, clamping and unclamping his tethers every few feet. With Tsibliyev almost out of sight ahead of him, he continued like this for several minutes, until the handrail suddenly stopped. Raising his head to look around, Linenger saw he was surrounded by all manner of structures the Russians had never told him about. Solar arrays towered over him like statuary. Clipped everywhere, to the handrails, to arrays, everywhere, was a thicket of little sensors and experiments.

“Vasily, which way can I go?” Linenger asked. He pointed off to one side. “Can I go this way?”

“No,” the commander replied, waving his hand. “Solar panel. Watch out.”

“Can I go this way?” he asked, pointing to what appeared to be a path through the panels.

“No. Solar sensor.”

Linenger’s anxiety rose as he examined the cluster of giant winglike solar panels he had entered. The edges were sharp – razor sharp is the term he later used in his debriefings. He was certain that if he bumped into one of the arrays, an edge would cut and puncture his space suit, instantly killing him. The outside of Kvant 2, in fact, was by far the most crowded exterior surface of the entire station. Because its outer hull was closest to the airlock, Kvant 2 was covered with all manner of Russian and American experiments. Richard Fullerton called it “a pincushion.”

NASA’s attitude to Linenger’s EVA, in fact, was strangely at odds with directives given the only other astronauts to walk outside Mir. A year earlier, during Shannon Lucid’s mission, two shuttle astronauts, Rich Clifford and Linda Godwin, climbed out of the shuttle Atlantis to attach experiments onto the docking module at the end of Kristall. Both the Russians and NASA had forbidden Clifford and Godwin from venturing off the docking module into the field of experiments and solar arrays farther up the hull of Kristall.“ They said it wasn’t safe,” recalls Clifford, who remembers agreeing wholeheartedly once he got outside Mir and glanced up the sides of Kristall.“ There are appendages all over Kristall,” he said. “Some of them were visibly sharp. Snag points. Sharp edges. Not a clear translation path.”

But a year later, no one raised questions about sending Linenger, a first-time spacewalker, out onto the station’s crowded outer hull. No one had mapped the arrays and experiments for him. No one had shown him the safest, or for that matter any, transit routes across the hull. He was on his own and he was frightened.

Tsibliyev hustled on ahead, leaving Linenger to fend for himself. Slowly the American inched forward, clipping his tethers to whatever handrails he could find and taking care to avoid the solar arrays. Finally, midway up Kvant 2, Linenger reached the end of the Strela arm. The arm was a 46-foot-long pole that, with the use of a hand crank at its base, could be telescoped out to its full length. To get over to the docking area at the end of Kristall, where they were to install the OPM, their plans called for Linenger to physically mount the end of the arm, as he would a horse and for Tsibliyev, using the crank, to extend the arm and swing Linenger out and across open space to the docking area. The idea was roughly the same as fly casting for trout. The boom was a fishing pole in the commander’s hands; Linenger was the hook. Once Linenger was swung safely across to the docking area, he was to retether his end of the pole to the station’s outer hull. Tsibliyev would then crawl his way along the arm to join him.

The slow-motion ballet began as Linenger started untethering the end of the Strela from the outer hull of Kvant 2. Meanwhile Tsibliyev made his way along the length of the module to the outer hull of base block, where the base of the Strela arm was anchored. As Tsibliyev readied the arm, Linenger clipped the unwieldy OPM unit to a hook at the end of it. Then he gingerly shimmied himself onto the boom beside it, hugging the slender steel rod with his knees and forearms.

Slowly, Tsibliyev swung the boom free, sending Linenger arcing out into open space. For Linenger, leaving the solid footing of the station’s outer hull behind, the impression of free fall was almost unbearable. Fighting a brief surge of panic, he was seized by the idea that the boom was about to break, sending him spiraling off into the vastness of space. Linenger later told his debriefers:

“I’m just out there dangling… very uncomfortable out there… again, you just overcome it. You say, ‘Okay, if it breaks, it breaks.’”

It got worse when Tsibliyev began extending the boom. To lenghten the arm, the commander had to forcibly yank on a set of handles, as if pulling a wooden stake out of the ground. Each yank, if successful, freed one more segment of the arm, thus lengthening the boom. For Linenger, hanging out at the end of the arm in open space, the yanks were nightmarish. Each time Tsibliyev pulled, the American felt a sudden jerk, and involuntarily tightened his grip.

Then things got even worse. As the boom extended out toward its full length, Linenger noticed it was beginning to sway, as if in a breeze. As the commander extended the arm still farther, Linenger felt the whole boom vibrate under him, then it began to slowly swing back and forth. He wanted to scream. After several long moments of this, the boom was finally extended to its full length, and Tsibliyev began attempting to maneuver Linenger across open space to the docking area at the end of Kristall.

This was where the real anxiety began for Linenger. The boom was so long, and the solar arrays so large, that Tsibliyev could not physically see Linenger for much of the time he was clinging to the end of the arm. The commander swung the arm by instinct in the direction of Kristall, while Linenger attempted to give him directions. But, Linenger learnt almost immediately, conventional directions didn’t mean much in space.

“To the right!” Linenger said at one point. “From you, to the right!” But Tsibliyev was standing at a 45-degree angle to Linenger. His right was somewhere beneath the American’s knee. Tsibliyev began craning his neck to spot Linenger, who tried in vain to give more directions.