The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

“If you read these transcripts, the crew calls down and says the vehicle is not performing correctly,” Engelauf remembers. “It goes right by the ground. They just say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s nice.’ About four or five times Vasily calls down and says, ‘Hey, the computer is spitting out garbage.’ And the ground says, ‘Well, we’ll look at it next pass.’ This goes on for four passes. It gets progressively worse, until they lose power altogether. These are classic symptoms of what is called cockpit resource mismanagement. It’s a fairly classic case of [the ground] missing the first road sign and then driving right off the cliff.”

Not until a pass at 2:29 that morning, nearly five hours after Lazutkin disconnected the cable, did it finally dawn on Koneev that the station was in crisis. Engelauf wrote in his analysis:

“The crew finally told the ground, ‘Well, we have [disconnected those] cables.’ The ground was totally surprised and asked what cable they talking about. This yielded a discussion in which TsUP finally grasped the situation onboard.”

The implications for the International Space Station were alarming. These were the same Russian ground controllers who would be working with NASA astronauts on ISS in two short years. Engelauf’s conclusions were blistering:

“There appears to be an inability on the part of TsUP, even when [telemetry] is available, to identify even major problems, like a loss of a major attitude sensor component,” he wrote. “The ground does not appear to give credence to an evident state of concern on the part of the mission commander. The sense of team cohesiveness between the ground and onboard crew, to which we are accustomed, is absent. TsUP situational awareness is also lacking. Although they are advising the crew to power off equipment, they evidently didn’t understand the severity of the power deficit nor pursue the cause [of] it.”

TsUP decided that the IVA would be performed by the next crew who would be Anatoli Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov, due on 7 August. They were given intensive training. The next NASA astronaut was to be David Wolf, who was given intensive EVA training in the Russian Orlan spacesuit.

The next mission was to have carried a French astronaut but it was postponed. NASA were upset to learn of this from CNN.

On 7 August the Soyuz carrying the next crew arrived and the new commander Anatoli Solovyov, docked manually.

On 14 August Tsibliyev and Lazutkin left Mir while Foale remained aboard. On 15 August the new crew flew their Soyuz around from the Kvant 2 docking port and filmed the damage.

On 18 August Progress M-35 was 170m away when the main computer crashed. Because the automatic (Kurs) system was disabled Solovyov had to use the TORU. He had it lined up at 5m when his screen went blank, so he brought it in blind.

Cosmonaut experiences a leak in his spacesuit

On 22 August they began the IVA. Burrough:

In the node, Foale helped Solovyov and Vinogradov into their suits, which were difficult to close without help. Then he swam through the adjoining hatch into the Soyuz. Behind him he locked down the hatch between the Soyuz and the node, then retreated into the command capsule itself and locked down the hatch between the command capsule and the Soyuz’s small living compartment. If for some reason the two cosmonauts were unable to repressurize the node after the EVA, they would be forced to depressurize the Soyuz living compartment, at which point they would enter the Soyuz and evacuate the station. Foale had his own reentry suit ready just in case.