The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

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.”