Cosmonauts Must Risk 2nd Walk in Space

Two cosmonauts who nearly ran out of oxygen when they were locked out of their space station by a sticky hatch must take another spacewalk next week to repair the door, Pravda reported today.

The cosmonauts, who encountered the trouble when they were outside their space station making repairs on Tuesday, will venture out again to fix the hatch, the Communist Party newspaper said.

It quoted Yuri Isaulov, a ground controller at the Soviet Mission Control Center in Kaliningrad, as saying cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Alexander Balandin will make a spacewalk Thursday “to put things in order.” The balky hatch was the latest in a series of problems to trouble the cosmonauts’ six-month mission.

Solovyev and Balandin went outside the Mir space station to fix thermal insulation that was damaged during the launch of the Soyuz TM-9 capsule they must use to return to Earth.

At the end of the strenuous spacewalk, which took two hours longer than planned, the cosmonauts were prevented from re-entering the spacecraft because they could not completely close the hatch they were using to re-enter, Soviet media reported.

With their oxygen running dangerously low and the inside of their suits soaked with perspiration, they were forced to use an emergency porthole on another part of the space station complex to get back inside, seven hours after their exit.

Once inside, the cosmonauts apparently closed an inner hatch to seal one end of the air-lock compartment that leads to the troublesome outside hatch.

Isaulov told Pravda that the outside hatch is “slightly ajar,” leaving the air-lock compartment unsealed.