The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

It was at roughly this point, with his knees squeezed around a vibrating steel pole dangling out in open space, swaying crazily across a field of knife-edged machinery, that the slapdash nature of the entire Russian EVA process struck Linenger with the force of a two-by-four.

Linenger later told his debriefers:

‘It’s risk upon risk is what you start feeling. When you go out the hatch and see C-clamps, and then you get on the end of the arm that’s [bending], you don’t have a lot of confidence that that thing’s not going to break either… You’ve got a lot of risk on your mind, and you really have to compartmentalize it all the way and do the job. And I was surprised I was able to do that. I was able to do that, and I’m not sure I was trained to do that. But I would suspect some people would not be able to do that.”

Linenger realized how little he really knew in advance about this space walk:

There’s nothing orchestrated at all about the EVA. It was winging it, basically, the whole time. It’s nothing like the shuttle, where you say, “Okay, there’s going to be a handhold here, and then you go from there, and you go to point B.”

Eventually, despite all the fits and starts, Linenger landed on the end of Kristall, just beside the docking port used by the shuttle. For the first time since leaving the hatch, he was able to anchor his feet under a rail, grab another rail with his hands, and feel steady. The handholds were solid there. He secured the Strela arm and waited for Tsibliyev to shimmy across it, which the Russian accomplished with no trouble. They began connecting the OPM to the outer hull at 10:14. They had been outside for just over an hour.

From his vantage point inside the station, Lazutkin tried his best to videotape the EVA, but the windows were small and didn’t give him the chance to film much. Out at the end of Kristall, painted orange to stand out against the gray-streaked station, Tsibliyev and Linenger looked like thick white tadpoles, slowly spinning this way and that, crawling all around the OPM, a fat egg floating in space. Each man appeared stiff and lifeless, arms and legs and trunks rotating as one, like plastic action figures in the hands of some giant cosmic child.

And then, just as Linenger thought he was beginning to master the endless sensation of falling, night fell. Outside Mir there was nothing subtle about the movement from day to night. One second the area around the two spacewalkers was lit as if by spotlight. The next moment the lights winked out, and they were engulfed by the darkest night Linenger had ever experienced. He wrote in a letter to his son:

Blackness, not merely dark, but absolute black. You see nothing. Nothing. You grip the handhold ever more tightly. You convince yourself that it is okay to be falling, alone, nowhere, in the blackness. You loosen your grip. Your eyes adjust, and you can make out forms. Another human being silhouetted against the heavens.