The near miss

On 4 March the supply vessel Progress M‑33 was due. The Progress had been described as an eight‑ton bumblebee with two solar arrays like wings. Tsibliyev manned the TORU with the Kurs radar providing information about the Progress’s range and speed. Ground control released the Progress 7km away from Mir; at the speed it was moving it would take 15 minutes to get to Mir. Linenger was watching from Kristall. When the Progress was 5km away the camera on board should have activated but it failed to give a picture. Tsibliyev remembered:

It was the most uncomfortable [time]. I felt as if I was sitting in a car, but I couldn’t see anything from the car, and I knew there was this huge truck out there bearing down on me. You don’t know if it’s going to hit you or miss you. It’s like a torpedo, and you’re in a sub.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev began asking the others. “Do you see it yet?”

“No,” said Lazutkin, peering out the big base block window behind the commander.

“No, nothing,” Linenger said over the intercom. There are three windows in Kristall, and he was floating between all three, scanning space for any sign of the Progress.

They waited.

“Do you see it?” Tsibliyev shouted a few moments later.

“No, I don’t see it,” Linenger breathed over the intercom. Lazutkin, floating at the base block window, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

Several moments passed.

“Do you see it?” Tsibliyev asked again.

“I don’t see anything,” Linenger replied, hurriedly shuttling between his portals.

Static filled the Sony monitor. Linenger could tell from the tone of Tsibliyev’s voice the Russian was growing anxious. More time went by. Somewhere out there a fully loaded spaceship was bearing down on them.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev demanded. He turned to Lazutkin. “What should I do?”

Lazutkin had no advice.

They waited.

At the two‑minute point, Tsibliyev began to sweat.

“Do you see it?” he shouted again.

“No, I don’t see it,” Linenger said. Lazutkin concurred. “Nothing,” he said.

“Find it!” Tsibliyev ordered. “Find it!”

After several more moments, during which he floated back and forth between Kristall’s three portals peering into the inky blackness of space, Linenger heard Lazutkin’s voice over the intercom. It was filled with tension.

“Jerry, get back in base block quick,” he said.

Lazutkin had spotted the Progress. Until this point Mir’s massive solar arrays had blocked his line of sight. But now he saw the ship approaching fast, slightly below the station. From his vantage point in base block, it appeared to be heading for an imminent collision.

“I see it!” Lazutkin said.

“Where is it?” Tsibliyev asked.

“It’s close!” Lazutkin replied.

This was as technical as Lazutkin’s response got. He remembered later: “I saw it in full size. All the solar arrays, the antennae, everything. That’s when I told Jerry to go to Soyuz.”

Linenger propelled himself down the length of Kristall as quickly as he could. Reaching the node, he saw Tsibliyev sitting at the console, jerking at the TORU joysticks. The Sony monitor still showed nothing but snow.

“What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted.

Lazutkin turned to Linenger. “Get in the spacecraft,” he said quickly. “Get ready to evacuate.”

As Linenger turned, he saw Tsibliyev furiously manipulating the TORU joysticks. He realized the Russian was attempting to fly Progress blind. Swiftly, Linenger folded himself into the Soyuz capsule and immediately began pulling out the various cables and ventilation tubes that connected the craft to Mir. Floating up into the node, he saw Tsibliyev still in base block, sitting before the monitor. He appeared to be on the verge of panic.

“What’s it doing?” the Russian shouted.

Lazutkin’s reply was unclear. Crouched at the mouth of the Soyuz, grabbing and disconnecting cables as fast as he could, Linenger glanced over his shoulder to see Tsibliyev jump back from the console and check the portal himself. Then he sprang back to the monitor and pulled at the black joysticks once more.

“What’s it doing?” Tsibliyev shouted at Lazutkin.

At TsUP the NASA ground team were watching the picture from the camera on board the Progress.

Tony Sang and his team crowded around the monitors in the NASA suite to watch Tsibliyev redock the Progress. Sang wasn’t especially worried about the maneuver. From conversations with Viktor Blagov he understood – incorrectly – that the Russians had handled these kinds of long‑distance manual dockings on several previous occasions with no problem.

In front of him, Sang’s monitor showed video being shot by the camera aboard Progress M‑33. Gone were the overlaying targeting sights that they normally would see; the sights had been unavailable since communication with the Altair Satellite was cut off. Still, the moment the image from Progress flickered onto his monitor, Sang realized something was amiss.

“This doesn’t look right,” he said.

The screen should show Mir floating in space as the Progress approached. Instead the monitor in NASA’s office showed Earth in the distance. There was no sign of the station.

“This doesn’t look like any Progress docking I’ve seen before,” Sang mused aloud.

As the minutes tick by, Sang and his group kept waiting for Mir to come into view.

“Where is it?” someone said.

After about ten minutes, with no sighting of Mir, the picture winked out. Several moments after that, as Mir once again came into range of a Russian ground station. Tsibliyev’s voice came over the comm. Sang and Tom Marshburn watched intently as one of their interpreters, a temporary replacement they didn’t know well, busily scribbled down what the commander was saying. As usual they had no sense of the words or even the tone of the cosmonaut’s message.

“The commander is really excited,” the interpreter said.

“What do you mean?” asked Marshburn.

“I don’t know, but he’s really, really excited,” the interpreter replied. “Something’s going on.”

New to the job, and to the technical terms Tsibliyev was using, the replacement interpreter was unable to decipher precisely what had happened. Sang realized Tsibliyev was angrily complaining about some kind of malfunction on his screen; apparently it wasn’t working. Curious, Sang and Marshburn hustled down to the floor to find out what was going on.

The Progress missed.

Barely fifteen seconds before impact, as Linenger scrunched himself into the Soyuz to prepare for emergency evacuation, Tsibliyev’s screen suddenly activated, and he realized the Progress would not hit the station. The screen, broadcasting from the camera aboard the Progress, showed Mir uncomfortably large and close. But from this vantage point Tsibliyev saw the Progress would pass underneath the station, narrowly avoiding a collision.

Crouching by the base block window, Lazutkin watched the ship sail by harmlessly. He guessed the distance at two hundred meters or less.

Emerging into the node, Linenger saw Tsibliyev dramatically sag in relief. All the pent‑up energy in the commander’s shoulders seemed to drain from his body as he leant heavily on the TORU controls. For the longest time no one said anything.

Tony Sang’s interpreter was right. Tsibliyev was angry.

“I will repeat,” the commander said at the beginning of the pass. “We watched it visually… There was no picture for a long time. At 10:19 it appeared… It started moving away, under us. We were close to it. We were like 200, 220 meters close to it, judging by its size… We managed to apply the brakes. The speed was around two meters [per second], and then it started moving away very fast. And that’s the last thing that we saw. Now there is no picture again… We couldn’t observe anything for a long time. There was no picture.”

Vladimir Solovyov himself got on the comm. “Did you have control of it?”

“I started braking and switching off the angle mechanisms. It passed by at a very high speed. It wasn’t possible to see where to go. I touched the handles intuitively. We didn’t collide with… There was no picture. And there is no picture now. And it’s hard to say how to control it. Only when we started braking, a picture appeared.”

For the moment, the TsUP was primarily concerned with locating the errant spacecraft. “[It’s] somewhere underneath,” the comm officer said.

“But I don’t have anything,” Tsibliyev said. “Nothing can be seen. Just the mist.”

“Read from the screen,” the comm officer suggested.

“I can’t see anything anyway,” Tsibliyev snapped. “It’s not us. We saw through the window that it started moving to the side of [base block].”

The rest of the comm pass was spent attempting to find the Progress. After signing off, Tsibliyev turned to Linenger and Lazutkin and launched into a lengthy tirade directed at the TsUP’s incompetence: “Jerry, what was I supposed to do? What could I do? The screen shows nothing! Nothing! What could I do?” It took a while for thecommander to settledown, andwhen hedid he heaved a long sigh.

“Guys,” he said, “I never want to do that again.”

Lazutkin was sent to the Elektron unit which generated their oxygen supply – there were two but one was not working as there was an air bubble blocking its electrolysis canal. Consequently he had to use their remaining Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator and had to insert the same type of cylinder which had burst into flame. It took six attempts to get the cylinder to engage but it did not catch fire.

On 2 April there was a malfunction in the station’s coolant system. TsUP detected a drop in pressure in the pipe carrying coolant to the Vozdukh CO₂ removal system, the second leak of this type.

It was getting very hot in the Kvant 2 module so TsUP sent commands to reorient the station to keep the the Kvant 2 module out of direct sunlight. Unfortunately the reorientation put the base block in direct sunlight causing the temperature to rise to 90°. They found the corroded joint which was leaking in Kvant near the docking assembly. The coolant was a type of anti‑freeze which gave off toxic fumes so they had to switch off the CO₂ removal system to reach the leaking joint. Linenger refused to help with repairs or cleaning up operations. The Russian psychologist at Ground Control, “Steve” Bogdashevsky, was concerned that the two Russians were becoming exhausted and stressed:

“We were first alarmed by the fire. Usually it takes a year or more to fully relieve the stress after something like this. It’s scary, and you could see it. The fear was in them. It really changes a person’s behavior. They became more cautious. They didn’t feel as relaxed. We started picking up nuances we didn’t pick up before. They became more demanding to the ground. For instance, [if] Vasily had a question the ground said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And they became irritated. After the failed docking, it became clear to us that the psychological state of the cosmonauts was becoming worse. I wrote a paper with an unfavorable psychological prognosis, and I called for everybody’s attention to change their attitude toward the crew. But the attitude remained the same. The attitude can be characterized as a sweat‑sucking system. [The TsUP] just makes them work harder and harder.”

Bogdashevsky’s first warnings to the TsUP came in a report written on March 23. His preliminary diagnosis for both Tsibliyev and Lazutkin was exhaustion. Further, he felt Tsibliyev was suffering from something he called “ostheno‑neurotic syndrome,” a related condition. “When a person is osthetic,” Bogdashevsky explains, “he gets tired faster and gets irritated. It depends on the person, the mind. One person can get depressed. Another person, his blood pressure changes. It depends.” In Tsibliyev’s case, it had led to increasing irritation, both at the ground and at Linenger.

Linenger’s EVA “just out there dangling”

Linenger and Tsibliyev were scheduled to do an EVA together, the purpose of which was to set up a piece of equipment called the Optical Properties Monitor (OPM) on the end of the Kristall module. The OPM was the size of a suitcase. Considerable friction had built up between Linenger and Tsibliyev which affected their preparation. As part of their preparation astronauts and cosmonauts usually discussed what they were going to do in detail. Linenger and Tsibliyev didn’t.

They were going to leave the station through the airlock which had been damaged in 1990. The set of clamps which had been used to close the hatch was still there. Burrough:

It was this set of clamps that Linenger and Tsibliyev were staring at uneasily seven years later. To his relief, the commander opened the hatch without incident and crawled outside onto an adjoining ladder just after nine o’clock. Linenger began to follow. Outside the sun was rising. The Russians had planned the EVA at sunrise so as to get the longest period of light. But because of that, Linenger’s first view of space was straight into the blazing sun.

Linenger told his post‑flight debriefing session:

“The first view I got was just blinding rays coming at me. Even with my gold visor down, it was just blinding. [I] was basically unable to see for the first three or four minutes going out the hatch.”

Once his eyes cleared the situation got worse. He exited the airlock. Then he climbed out onto a horizontal ladder that stretched out along the side of the module into the darkness. Trying to get his bearings, he was suddenly hit by an overwhelming sense that he was falling, as if from a cliff. As he clamped his tethers onto the handrail, he fought back a wave of panic and tightened his grip on the ladder. But he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was plummeting through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour. His mind raced: You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re not going to fall. The bottom is way far away.

And now a second, even more intense feeling washed over him: he was not just plunging off a cliff. The entire cliff was crumbling away.

Linenger told his debriefers:

“It wasn’t just me falling, but everything was falling, which gave [me] an even more unsettling feeling. So, it was like you had to overcome forty years or whatever of life experiences that [you] don’t let go when everything falls. It was a very strong, almost overwhelming sensation that you just had to control. And I was able to control it, and I was glad I was able to control it. But I could see where it could have put me over the edge.”

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.

“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:

“We noticed these little things. What was different about Mike was he started studying everything right away. He said, ‘Show me how everything works.’ And we gave him things to do. He asked all the right questions. Mike amazed us by mastering [systems] theory sometimes better than we knew it. He was like a child, and he was growing, and he grew into a real cosmonaut engineer.”

Tsibliyev recalled:

“When Michael first came on the station, the three of us were sitting around the table, and Michael said, ‘I came here to make you happy with me.’ He didn’t say he came to make himself happy. He came to make us happy. The fact that he integrated into the crew was because of these qualities.”

There was another coolant leak. Lazutkin found it in a crack in a pipe in Kvant. When Tsibliyev got a globule of coolant full in the face it took him three days to recover. By this time he was already tired and stressed.