Mir loses all its power

An EKG test on Tsibliyev revealed a heart beat irregularity of the kind prompted by stress – Foale would have to do the IVA instead of him.

During the IVA the node was to be depressurized. The cables were to be divided into three groups: those to be deconnected a week before, those a day before and those on the day. Lazutkin made a mistake when he deconnected the wrong cable – it carried power to the main computer which crashed and the batteries began to drain.

By dawn on 17 July the station had lost all power because the Ground Control was too slow in reacting.

Phil Engelauf was the Missions Operations Directorate (MOD) flight director at NASA. When he read the transcripts he concluded:

“If you read these transcripts, the crew calls down and says the vehicle is not performing correctly,” Engelauf remembers. “It goes right by the ground. They just say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s nice.’ About four or five times Vasily calls down and says, ‘Hey, the computer is spitting out garbage.’ And the ground says, ‘Well, we’ll look at it next pass.’ This goes on for four passes. It gets progressively worse, until they lose power altogether. These are classic symptoms of what is called cockpit resource mismanagement. It’s a fairly classic case of [the ground] missing the first road sign and then driving right off the cliff.”

Not until a pass at 2:29 that morning, nearly five hours after Lazutkin disconnected the cable, did it finally dawn on Koneev that the station was in crisis. Engelauf wrote in his analysis:

“The crew finally told the ground, ‘Well, we have [disconnected those] cables.’ The ground was totally surprised and asked what cable they talking about. This yielded a discussion in which TsUP finally grasped the situation onboard.”

The implications for the International Space Station were alarming. These were the same Russian ground controllers who would be working with NASA astronauts on ISS in two short years. Engelauf’s conclusions were blistering:

“There appears to be an inability on the part of TsUP, even when [telemetry] is available, to identify even major problems, like a loss of a major attitude sensor component,” he wrote. “The ground does not appear to give credence to an evident state of concern on the part of the mission commander. The sense of team cohesiveness between the ground and onboard crew, to which we are accustomed, is absent. TsUP situational awareness is also lacking. Although they are advising the crew to power off equipment, they evidently didn’t understand the severity of the power deficit nor pursue the cause [of] it.”

TsUP decided that the IVA would be performed by the next crew who would be Anatoli Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov, due on 7 August. They were given intensive training. The next NASA astronaut was to be David Wolf, who was given intensive EVA training in the Russian Orlan spacesuit.

The next mission was to have carried a French astronaut but it was postponed. NASA were upset to learn of this from CNN.

On 7 August the Soyuz carrying the next crew arrived and the new commander Anatoli Solovyov, docked manually.

On 14 August Tsibliyev and Lazutkin left Mir while Foale remained aboard. On 15 August the new crew flew their Soyuz around from the Kvant 2 docking port and filmed the damage.

On 18 August Progress M‑35 was 170m away when the main computer crashed. Because the automatic (Kurs) system was disabled Solovyov had to use the TORU. He had it lined up at 5m when his screen went blank, so he brought it in blind.