Fellowship Forged in Mir’s Crucible

They started out as strangers and ended up blood brothers--three space-age musketeers who fought to save Mir and each other.

Back on Earth more than a month now, NASA astronaut Michael Foale still gets misty-eyed when he talks about his first crew aboard the Russian space station, blamed by many for the near-catastrophic collision in June.

“They’re about as close to being family without being family now as anyone on this planet,” Foale says. “I love those guys.”

Those guys are Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin, probably the most chastised--and luckless --spacemen in recent times. Even before Foale arrived at Mir in May for a 4 1/2-month stay, the Russians had endured a horrendous fire as well as fumes, leaks and oxygen-generator breakdowns.

“I never actually got to train with them before flight,” explains Foale, 40, a British-born astrophysicist. “I knew them socially and had seen them over here in Houston once or twice, but really they were unknown to me until I got on board.”

The astronaut was just getting to know his companions--where they grew up, why they became cosmonauts, what they expected from their mission--when disaster struck.

This is Foale’s recollection of the worst wreck ever in space, the day he thought he was going to die.

*

To Foale’s relief, Tsibliyev was in a good mood the morning of June 25. The commander had checked the TV system that would be used for the docking test later in the day, and everything seemed OK.

Tsibliyev had fretted for weeks about this test, and for good reason. The last time he tried to steer a Progress supply ship to its Mir docking port by remote control nearly four months earlier, the TV images vanished in the final few seconds and the speeding craft almost rammed the station.

Russia’s Mission Control outside Moscow ordered the tests because of financial problems--the space program could no longer afford the Ukrainian-made parts needed for the usual automatic docking system.

As Tsibliyev guided the cargo ship toward Mir, using joysticks and relying on TV views of the station taken by a camera on the ship, Foale and Lazutkin peered out windows. The two were supposed to measure the speed and distance of the approaching craft with lasers, but never got the chance.

*

From the TV pictures, Tsibliyev couldn’t tell how fast the cargo ship was moving in. By the time he realized how dangerously close the ship was, it was too late for him to stop it.

Lazutkin spotted the supply ship careening toward them and shouted in Russian: “Michael, go to the spacecraft!”

The spacecraft was the attached Soyuz escape capsule.

Foale floated as fast as he could to the Soyuz. His fingers lightly touched the walls of the chamber just outside the Soyuz when he felt the shudder and heard the thud.

The astronaut mistakenly thought the supply ship had hit the back of Mir where it was meant to dock. Actually, it banged against a solar panel on the Spektr lab module and then slammed into the module, piercing it.

Foale froze. His stomach lurched, and he became “terribly aware as to what was going to happen next.”

He knew if there was a gaping hole, the air pressure would plummet and all three would die instantly. If it was a leak, they might have time to flee in the Soyuz and return to Earth.

Foale waited to hear or feel the air rushing out of Mir, but the moment passed--the only moment he feared for his life--and he knew he had a fighting chance. Then he felt the pressure drop in his ears as though he were on an elevator. That made him feel better; the pressure wasn’t dropping so fast after all. Alarms began shrieking.

Lazutkin, who saw the supply ship hit Spektr, joined Foale in the connecting chamber, or node, and the two men removed two cables snaking through the entrance of the Soyuz. Then they feverishly began disconnecting the 21 cables passing from the node into the ruptured Spektr module, which held most of Foale’s science experiments and all his belongings.

By the time they closed the hatch to Spektr, 10 minutes had passed.

Ten tense minutes.

Tsibliyev, meanwhile, was back in the main module on the radio with Russian Mission Control. Flight controllers ordered him to stay at his post.

The three men struggled over the next several hours--indeed, the next several days--to keep Mir on course with its remaining electricity-generating solar panels pointed toward the sun. The accident had slashed Mir’s power by half.

*

Problems mounted as the weeks passed: computer breakdowns, power outages, unbearable heat. Foale thought they might have to evacuate the station because of the successive computer failures, but he never again feared for his life.

He worried, though, about his commander. The stressed-out Tsibliyev developed an irregular heartbeat in July and was barred from making an internal spacewalk to salvage power aboard the 11-year-old station. Foale and Lazutkin spent days trying to convince Tsibliyev that the collision wasn’t entirely his fault and that the decision by others to proceed with the docking test had been “a great mistake.”

The finger-pointing, in fact, already had begun by the time Tsibliyev and Lazutkin returned to Earth in August. As Tsibliyev suspected, he ended up shouldering most of the blame.

After participating in a spacewalk to find Spektr’s holes, Foale left Mir in early October aboard space shuttle Atlantis, which had ferried up a new computer and a fresh astronaut, Dr. David Wolf.

Foale has spent the last month regaining his strength, telling NASA all about “this little adventure of mine” and enjoying time with his wife and two children.

He refuses to dwell on how close he and his colleagues came to death that fateful day on Mir. And although he’s not sure when he’ll see Tsibliyev and Lazutkin again, he knows how he’ll greet them: with hugs and tears.