Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

“I need to go out two feet more!”

“No, no, I need to go out farther to miss this solar panel!”

It was no use. Tsibliyev could not follow his directions. Gradually, the Russian began to swing the boom over toward Kristall, but its swaying and vibrating were giving Linenger fits. By this point, the boom was so long it began to swing on a wider and wider arc. Linenger was certain an S-curve had developed in the pole, limiting the commander’s control over it. He was convinced the whole boom was about to snap.

He continued helplessly swinging back and forth as Tsibliyev moved the pole across the face of the station. Then, at one point, Linenger turned his head and realized he was about to crash into a sharp-edged solar array.

“Vasily, stop!” he said.

The commander stopped moving the pole, but his momentum brought Linenger, by his estimate, within six inches of the array.

He exhaled.

It was at roughly this point, with his knees squeezed around a vibrating steel pole dangling out in open space, swaying crazily across a field of knife-edged machinery, that the slapdash nature of the entire Russian EVA process struck Linenger with the force of a two-by-four.

Linenger later told his debriefers:

‘It’s risk upon risk is what you start feeling. When you go out the hatch and see C-clamps, and then you get on the end of the arm that’s [bending], you don’t have a lot of confidence that that thing’s not going to break either… You’ve got a lot of risk on your mind, and you really have to compartmentalize it all the way and do the job. And I was surprised I was able to do that. I was able to do that, and I’m not sure I was trained to do that. But I would suspect some people would not be able to do that.”

Linenger realized how little he really knew in advance about this space walk:

There’s nothing orchestrated at all about the EVA. It was winging it, basically, the whole time. It’s nothing like the shuttle, where you say, “Okay, there’s going to be a handhold here, and then you go from there, and you go to point B.”

Eventually, despite all the fits and starts, Linenger landed on the end of Kristall, just beside the docking port used by the shuttle. For the first time since leaving the hatch, he was able to anchor his feet under a rail, grab another rail with his hands, and feel steady. The handholds were solid there. He secured the Strela arm and waited for Tsibliyev to shimmy across it, which the Russian accomplished with no trouble. They began connecting the OPM to the outer hull at 10:14. They had been outside for just over an hour.

From his vantage point inside the station, Lazutkin tried his best to videotape the EVA, but the windows were small and didn’t give him the chance to film much. Out at the end of Kristall, painted orange to stand out against the gray-streaked station, Tsibliyev and Linenger looked like thick white tadpoles, slowly spinning this way and that, crawling all around the OPM, a fat egg floating in space. Each man appeared stiff and lifeless, arms and legs and trunks rotating as one, like plastic action figures in the hands of some giant cosmic child.

And then, just as Linenger thought he was beginning to master the endless sensation of falling, night fell. Outside Mir there was nothing subtle about the movement from day to night. One second the area around the two spacewalkers was lit as if by spotlight. The next moment the lights winked out, and they were engulfed by the darkest night Linenger had ever experienced. He wrote in a letter to his son:

Blackness, not merely dark, but absolute black. You see nothing. Nothing. You grip the handhold ever more tightly. You convince yourself that it is okay to be falling, alone, nowhere, in the blackness. You loosen your grip. Your eyes adjust, and you can make out forms. Another human being silhouetted against the heavens.

They flicked on their visor lights. Russian EVA protocols called for them to stop working during night passes, unless necessary. Linenger, halting work on the OPM hookup, stood absolutely still. There in the dark he once again began to feel disoriented. Slowly, inch by inch, the sensation of falling was somehow changing – to what, he wasn’t immediately sure. Then, ever so slowly, he began to feel as if he was falling forward. As the minutes ticked by, he felt as if he was slowly being stood on his head. There in the pitch black of space, still feeling as if he was falling off a cliff, he began to fight the almost uncontrollable urge to stand upright. His head told him he was being ridiculous. There is no “upright” in space. But his emotions told him otherwise. Bit by bit, space was slowly standing him upside down.

Finally, after a half hour spent tumbling forward, the sun returned and Linenger now faced the awkward feeling that he had been turned upside down. He forced himself to continue. Eventually they finished installing the OPM and climbed back across the Strela to the outer hull of Kvant 2. There Linenger detached the debris-catching experiment, called the Particle Impact Experiment (PIE), and stuck it under one arm. For Linenger one final rush of anxiety came as they finished. He was standing in the middle of Kvant 2’s maze of hulking solar arrays, sensors, and boxy experiments with no clear path back to the airlock. In fact, he realized, he had no idea where the airlock was. He saw what he thought might be a promising path but immediately found his way blocked by a large box. Linenger asked:

“Vasily, how can I get over this experiment over here?”

Tsibliyev replied:

“It’s going to be tough. I’m going to start taking stuff back into the airlock. See you inside.”

Linenger was dumbfounded. He had no idea which way the airlock was, and Tsibliyev clearly had no intention of showing him the way. He watched as the commander pushed off from where he had been tethered, and began turning his head, apparently in search of the airlock. It dawned on Linenger that the Russian didn’t know where he was going either. Linenger remembered:

I could tell he had no clue.

Surrounded by solar arrays and a maze of experiments, Linenger searched for something – anything – to orient himself. After several moments he spotted a window, made his way carefully toward it, peered inside, and saw the familiar confines of Kvant 2. Getting his orientation, he realized Tsibliyev was going the wrong way. He said:

“Vasily, airlock’s that way. See you inside.”

Linenger gingerly crawled toward the airlock and within minutes joined Tsibliyev inside. They had been outside the station for five hours. Carefully closing the hatch behind them, Linenger heaved a giant sigh of relief. Later, when they had wriggled out of their spacesuits, Lazutkin cooked them a meal. The next day Linenger triumphantly e-mailed Sang:

“EVA pretty much flawless.”

The remaining three weeks of Linenger’s stay abroad Mir were spent finishing experiments, packing up and cleaning the station. On 17 May Atlantis arrived carrying Linenger’s replacement, Mike Foale.

Foale was the son of a Royal Air Force pilot who had been born and educated in the United Kingdom but was entitled to US citizenship because his mother was an American. He had an MA in Astrophysics and had worked for NASA in shuttle payload at Mission Control. He had been accepted as an astronaut candidate at his third attempt in 1987 and flew three shuttle missions between 1992 and 1995. When he arrived he was 40 and had worked very hard at learning Russian. He was scrupulous in becoming part of the crew’s routine by attending meals and communications sessions. Lazutkin remembered: