The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“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: