Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

He turned and faced the entrance to the Soyuz, where a tangle of cables, a mass of gray-white spaghetti, spilled out of the escape craft’s open mouth. Executing a deft little flip, he turned backward and entered the Soyuz feet first, extending his legs behind him, his head and shoulders protruding from the capsule.

As he turned to look back toward base block, Foale fully expected Lazutkin and Tsibliyev to come charging into the node after him to begin the evacuation. They didn’t. Foale waited five, ten, then twenty seconds. There was no sign of the Russians. They remained somewhere back in base block, out of his sight.

After roughly a minute of waiting, Foale began to worry. He was certain the Progress struck the station either in base block or in Kvant. These were considered “non-isolatable” areas – that is, a hull breach in either area could not be sealed off. In emergency drills simulating a meteorite strike against the hull of either module, the crew was given no option but to abandon ship. Foale couldn’t understand why Lazutkin and Tsibliyev weren’t evacuating.

Tsibliyev swivelled out of his seat and crouched by the floor window behind him. There, barely 30 feet away, so close he felt he could reach out and touch it, he saw the Progress sagging against the base of one of Spektr’s solar arrays. It looked as if the long needle on the leading edge of the cargo ship’s hull had pierced a jagged hole in the array’s wing-like expanse. He couldn’t be certain, but the Progress appeared lodged against the hull. Lazutkin crouched by the window and looked down. He saw it too.

The commander turned, thinking he would fire one of Progress’s forward thrusters to, as he later put it, “kick it” off the station. But just as he began to leave the window, he saw the cargo ship shift and move forward once again, striking and denting a boxy gray radiator on the side of Spektr’s hull. Then it kept moving forward and, after a long moment, floated free again.

Tsibliyev held his breath, hoping that the Progress would now fly free of the station without hitting any more of its outer structures.

“Where are they?”

Foale couldn’t understand what Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were doing. Emergency procedures mandated that they immediately evacuate the station, but the two Russians were nowhere to be seen. It occurred to Foale that his two crewmates were doing something to try and save the station, when they should be evacuating it. He knew that this kind of going-down-with-the-ship mentality wouldn’t have been unusual among the pride-soaked cosmonaut corps; it was precisely the reckless kind of behaviour Linenger had been warning everyone about. Foale crawled out of the Soyuz and began to fly back toward base block, intent on finding out what was going on.

But the moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, Lazutkin hurtled out of base block into the node. In a flash he was at the little ship’s entrance. Foale, realizing that Lazutkin was now prepared to begin the evacuation, was unsure of his role.

“Sasha, what can I do?” he asked.

Lazutkin ignored or didn’t hear the question; the alarm was so loud it was difficult to hear anything. Moving with the fury of a man in hand-to-hand combat, Lazutkin grabbed the giant, worm-like ventilation tube and tore it in half. Wordlessly he seized cable after cable, furiously rending each one at its connection point. Foale watched in silence.

It took Lazutkin barely a minute to disconnect all the cables. Finally only one remained. It was the PVC tube, which channelled condensate water from the Soyuz into the station’s main water tanks. Lazutkin could not separate it with his hands. He needed a tool.

A wrench. They needed a wrench. Lazutkin looked frantically for one all around the node, which was lined with spare hatches and tools and equipment. He and Foale spent nearly a minute in search of a wrench before Lazutkin found one, floating by a blue thread. He handed it to Foale and showed him how to unfasten the PVC tube. Foale retreated into the Soyuz, applied the wrench, and began turning as fast as he could.

When he was certain Foale knew how to unfasten the PVC tube, Lazutkin turned toward the entrance to the Spektr module. Foale, while saying nothing aloud, remained convinced the leak was in base block or Kvant. Lazutkin didn’t have to guess. He had seen the Progress lodged against the Spektr module’s solar array. He assumed that whatever breach the hull had suffered, it almost certainly occurred in Spektr. Lazutkin pushed off from the Soyuz entrance, arced across the node, and shimmied into Spektr.

Diving head first into the module, he immediately heard an angry hissing noise from somewhere below and to his left. It was, he knew, the sound of air escaping into space. His heart sank. At this moment, Sasha Lazutkin was certain they were all about to die.

On Mir the hatchways between the modules were 3 feet in diameter. There were cables running through them so that they couldn’t be closed without cutting or removing the cables.

Lazutkin realized immediately that in order to save the station, he had to somehow seal off Spektr. Like all the other hatchways, it was lined with wrapped packets of thin white and gray cables, 18 cables in all, plus a giant worm-like ventilation tube.

A knife, Lazutkin thought: I’ve got to find a knife to cut the cables. While Foale remained inside the Soyuz, finishing off the PVC tube, Lazutkin soared back through the node and dived headfirst into base block, where he saw Tsibliyev poised to begin talking to the ground. Vaulting over the commander’s head, Lazutkin shot down the length of base block, past the dinner table, and into the mouth of Kvant. He remembered a large pair of scissors he had stowed alongside one of the panels, but when he reached the panel, he was heartsick: the scissors weren’t there. Then he saw a tiny, four-inch knife – “better to cut butter with than cables,” as Lazutkin remembered it. Normally he used the blade to peel the insulation off cables that needed to be rewired.

Lazutkin grabbed the knife and flew back down to the node. Sticking his upper body into Spektr, he grabbed a bundle of cables and instantly realized his plan wouldn’t work: the cables were too thick to be cut with his little blade. Each of the bundles was fitted into one of dozens of connectors that lined the inside of the hatch. Frantically Lazutkin began grabbing the cable bundles one after another, unscrewing their connections and tossing the loose ends aside, to float in the air.

After a moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, where he had finally disconnected the PVC tube, just as Lazutkin finished ripping apart the first few cables. Foale was immediately surprised to see Lazutkin working at the mouth of Spektr. Still believing the leak was somewhere back in base block or Kvant, he was convinced that Lazutkin was isolating the wrong part of the station. If Foale was correct, sealing off Spektr would be a disastrous move. It would actually reduce the station’s air supply, thereby causing Mir’s remaining atmosphere to rush out of the breach even faster.

Foale remembered:

“I was still very concerned we were isolating the wrong place. I was not going to stop him physically – yet. But that was my next thought: Should I try and stop him?”

Burrough:

Instead, intimidated by the sheer fury with which Lazutkin was tearing at the cables, Foale floated by and watched. As Lazutkin rended each line, its loose end floated out into the node – “eighteen snakes floating around, like the head of Medusa,” Foale recalled. Foale began grabbing the loose lines and binding them with rubber bands he found in the node. Finally, he said something.