The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

The third US astronaut aboard Mir was John F. Blaha. The daily life of US astronauts aboard Mir was dictated by a schedule devised by the NASA ground crew at TsUP, which had to be approved by Russian ground control before it was sent up to the astronaut. This approval was known as a Form 24. Blaha was having difficulty performing his tasks because the times allowed were not realistic, based on conditions in the shuttle. In addition his Russian wasn’t very good.

Blaha had to work with a constantly changing operations team on the ground, some of whom were new to the job and did not know what Blaha had already done. Several times he was told to do work he had already done, for example, the SAMS calibration device. This was a series of sensors, each the size of a softball, used to study vibrations and structural stress. Having stayed up late several nights looking for it in vain, a new operations leader told him to find it again.

The Russian commander, Valery Korzun, spoke up for him and his work schedule was reduced by 25 per cent. Burrough:

Even with the reduced workload, Blaha was approaching a state of exhaustion. The workdays aboard Mir ran fourteen hours and longer. “I can’t do this anymore,” he finally told Korzun. “I’m fifty-four years old, and I’m not going to make it if I continue at this pace.” At night Blaha lay awake in his sleeping bag, strapped to the floor down in Spektr, and obsessed about his workload. “It just drove me into some kind of protective envelope,” Blaha recalls. “I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t happy. I was trying to run up a mountain, and the Russians were trying to help me, and the Americans were trying to bring me down.” Many nights he called up the computerized scrapbook Brenda had made for him and looked through pictures of his children and grandchildren.

For the first time in his long career in space, Blaha was desperately unhappy. Nothing about the mission, a mission he had worked more than two years for, had gone as planned. Nothing about it was fun. He realized he was withdrawing from Korzun and Kaleri and snapping at the ground. It took a long time for him to acknowledge that something was wrong, and when he finally did he realized it was something worse than simple sadness.

It was depression. He realized he was suffering through a mild depression. The thought stunned him. Blaha had always thought of himself as a can-do guy, a fighter pilot, a positive thinker, the kind of person who helped his crewmates through whatever dark nights of the soul they encountered. The idea that he could be facing depression was almost too much to comprehend. Of course he told no one – not Korzun or Kaleri, not Brenda, not Al Holland, and certainly not his ground team, who he felt would use it as more evidence that he wasn’t pulling his load.

Once he suspected the problem was depression, Blaha characteristically attacked it in a methodical, thought-out manner. Lying awake at night, he probed for the reasons he felt the way he did.

John, you love space, you’ve always enjoyed space. Why don’t you love space now? Yes, working with Korzun and Kaleri had been a surprise, but they were good men, ready to listen to his suggestions. They were professionals. It was the Americans he couldn’t abide. The people on the ground have no idea what is going on. No concept. And they won’t even acknowledge that this is the truth.