The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

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.’”