The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

When he thought it through, he realized he couldn’t blame poor Caasi Moore. Moore had been thrown into the process at so late a date, no one could have gotten up to speed in time for the mission. And Pat McGinnis? Blaha could hardly blame the young flight doc for gravitating toward other, more interesting astronauts. No, the man he blamed was Frank Culbertson. There at night, alone with his thoughts, he pondered Culbertson for hours. Culbertson was a nice man, everyone agreed. But his incompetence, Blaha felt, was startling. Culbertson seemed to float above the fray, paying far more attention to George Abbey than his own astronauts. “If I was Frank Culbertson’s boss,” Blaha began saying, “I would put him in jail.”

Korzun and Kaleri saw what Blaha was going through. “The first sign John was in a depressive state was he didn’t have a desire to speak. When we saw this, we tried to get him out of this state. We spoke to him about things that had nothing to do with space. We spoke about [life on] the ground, about our childhoods; we found subjects that were dear to him. He spoke about his family. We tried to help him do his work. John always offered to help us, but since we saw the state he was in, we gave him more free time, to watch movies and [NASA videotapes of] baseball and football games. When we realized he liked the amateur radio, we worked to give him more time on that.” Adds Kaleri, “We tried to calm him down by telling him a lot of other people had been through things like this.”

Lying awake at night, Blaha began repeating a single thought, mantra-like. John, this is the environment you’re in. You used to love space. You sparkled in space. And now whatever’s going on, you need to accept this. Valery and Sasha are the two human beings in your life now. The ground doesn’t matter. You need to accept this till the shuttle can come.

Bit by bit, day by day, he came out of it. He started a new routine that conserved his energy and improved his spirits. Every morning after breakfast he began talking on the ham radio in base block, chatting with American amateurs in snippets of a few minutes apiece; Mir moved so quickly across the surface of the Earth it was difficult to maintain a longer signal. At night he tried to finish work at eight and watch a movie. His favorite tapes were old Super Bowls and Dallas Cowboy football games, all of which Al Holland and the NASA psychological support team had sent to the station for him.

Kaleri and Korzun realized the worst had passed one evening when Blaha lingered at the dinner table while the Russians took turns exercising on the treadmill. Up till that point Blaha had never bothered to eat meals with the two Russians, sticking instead to his shuttle-like regimen of eating when he could. “He didn’t talk to us, he just worked,” remembers Kaleri. “For me the first sign he was changing to our lifestyle was on this evening. He didn’t have dinner without us. At first we kept on exercising. We said, ‘John, go ahead, eat.’ He said, ‘No, I’ll wait.’ And he ate with us! From that moment on, it was a totally different life for John. We discovered John was an entirely different person. He liked to talk! We started communicating with him. It was wonderful.”

Blaha’s astronaut replacement was Jerry Linenger, a US Navy doctor. By the time Linenger arrived Blaha was exhausted and on 22 January he left vowing never to do it again.

Linenger spent his days running NASA experiments, for example, Liquid Metal Diffusion, an experiment he ran from a laptop. “Space is a frontier and I’m out here exploring,” he wrote to his son. He exercised regularly on the treadmill, his running making the whole station resonate.

Mir’s Kurs system fails

On 12 February 1997 Soyuz-TM25 stopped 150m from Mir. Soyuz-TM25 contained Vasily Tsibliyev, Aleksandr “Sasha” Lazutkin and the German “guest” cosmonaut Reinhard Ewald, who would return to earth with Korzun and Kaleri on 2 March. The changeover period with six people aboard was a crowded time.