The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

During the IVA they reconnected all the cables except the one which connected Spektr’s solar arrays to the main computer, which meant that Priroda and Kristall remained dark. They couldn’t find the hole either.

On 6 September they made an EVA to find the hole. Burrough:

Crouching inside his Orlan spacesuit in the air lock at the end of Kvant 2, Foale nervously eyed the hatch that led outside the station. Solovyov was right behind him, and at the commander’s urging, he gave the rusty hatch a shove. Apparently some air remained in the air lock, because the hatch sprang out forcefully, banging back onto its hinges. Hanging on to the hatch, Foale was jerked outside the station along with it.

“Whoa!” he said.

Regaining his composure, Foale quickly moved onto the ladder outside the station. Unlike Linenger, he felt no sensation of falling; Foale had walked in space aboard the shuttle and loved spacewalking. He and Solovyov had spent hours diagramming their work. Their six-hour spacewalk was fairly straightforward. They were to make their way to Spektr’s outer hull, check it for punctures, and construct handrails for later repair work. If they had time, they were to perform a minor repair on the Vozdukh system and retrieve a small radiation monitor.

Foale, ignoring Linenger’s “razor-sharp” solar arrays, quickly made his way down the length of Kvant 2 and crawled onto base block, where he straddled the crane at the base of the Strela arm. Behind him Solovyov muscled out a large bag containing the scaffolding they were to assemble on Spektr. It took just over an hour for Solovyov to maneuver his way to the Strela arm, straddle its far end, and have Foale move him across open space to Spektr. At the Star City hydrolab, Foale had practiced using the Strela arm exactly once and wasn’t at all sure he could do what was needed; as it turned out, the crane proved easy to operate.

Once at Spektr, Solovyov wasted no time. The TsUP had identified seven possible places the coin-size puncture might be located. Solovyov quickly took out a knife and began cutting through the foam insulation that covered portions of Spektr’s outer hull. For ninety minutes, while Foale waited at the Strela’s base, Solovyov methodically carved up the insulation near the impact area. The Mylar material kept fluffing up as he cut. “I should have taken scissors but not a knife,” he said at one point.

It is, in fact, an impossible job, akin to finding a lost coin in a junk heap.

After two hours Solovyov gave up. There was no hole, at least none he could see. “It is strange – to rumple this way and destroy nothing,” he said.

A little before eight Foale shimmied down the Strela arm and joined the commander, who moved farther out on Spektr’s hull. He spent the last hour of the EVA manually rotating the three undamaged solar arrays to a position where they would more fully face the Sun. In this way the TsUP hoped to regain more power from the damaged module.

By ten both men were back in the air lock. Solovyov’s hunt for the puncture had gone on so long they had no time to erect the scaffolding – which they left tethered outside Spektr – or work on the Vozdukh system. It was Foale’s job to close the outer hatch, and for some reason Vladimir Solovyov wanted him to work faster.

“Hurry, Michael, hurry,” he said.

But Foale sensed something was wrong. The hatch didn’t feel right when it closed.

“Hurry,” he heard someone say.

“Look, guys, you’re rushing me,” Foale said. “This does not feel right. I have to reopen the hatch and do this again.”

Foale took an extra minute to make sure the hatch closed tightly, his sixth sense proving to be on target. It was the last time Mir’s outer hatch ever worked correctly.

The computer crashed twice more before Foale left Mir in October.

NASA administrator David Goldin confirmed that Phase One would continue.

The last NASA astronaut to live aboard Mir was Andy Thomas, an Australian.

John Glenn’s shuttle flight