The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Lazutkin ignored or didn’t hear the question; the alarm was so loud it was difficult to hear anything. Moving with the fury of a man in hand-to-hand combat, Lazutkin grabbed the giant, worm-like ventilation tube and tore it in half. Wordlessly he seized cable after cable, furiously rending each one at its connection point. Foale watched in silence.

It took Lazutkin barely a minute to disconnect all the cables. Finally only one remained. It was the PVC tube, which channelled condensate water from the Soyuz into the station’s main water tanks. Lazutkin could not separate it with his hands. He needed a tool.

A wrench. They needed a wrench. Lazutkin looked frantically for one all around the node, which was lined with spare hatches and tools and equipment. He and Foale spent nearly a minute in search of a wrench before Lazutkin found one, floating by a blue thread. He handed it to Foale and showed him how to unfasten the PVC tube. Foale retreated into the Soyuz, applied the wrench, and began turning as fast as he could.

When he was certain Foale knew how to unfasten the PVC tube, Lazutkin turned toward the entrance to the Spektr module. Foale, while saying nothing aloud, remained convinced the leak was in base block or Kvant. Lazutkin didn’t have to guess. He had seen the Progress lodged against the Spektr module’s solar array. He assumed that whatever breach the hull had suffered, it almost certainly occurred in Spektr. Lazutkin pushed off from the Soyuz entrance, arced across the node, and shimmied into Spektr.

Diving head first into the module, he immediately heard an angry hissing noise from somewhere below and to his left. It was, he knew, the sound of air escaping into space. His heart sank. At this moment, Sasha Lazutkin was certain they were all about to die.

On Mir the hatchways between the modules were 3 feet in diameter. There were cables running through them so that they couldn’t be closed without cutting or removing the cables.

Lazutkin realized immediately that in order to save the station, he had to somehow seal off Spektr. Like all the other hatchways, it was lined with wrapped packets of thin white and gray cables, 18 cables in all, plus a giant worm-like ventilation tube.