Leaving Earth extracts
Some extracts about Sergei from Leaving Earth by Robert Zimmerman (2003, Joseph Henry Press). I have to admit this was the reason I bought the book :-). The book is quite a good read as there is lots of information about the Russian space program. My one irritation is the author’s constant harping on about the supposed joys of capitalism and “freedom” in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Never mind the misery millions of people endured as they saw the society they had grown up in collapse, the selling off of government assets to corrupt oligarches, the loss of Russia’s status in the world (from being feared/respected to being made fun of), and…oh, I won’t go on about this here.
Chapter 10 – Mir: The Joys of Freedom
[Pages 307-313. (I will refrain from sardonic comments about the chapter title). This describes Sergei’s second long-duration mission on Mir, during which the Soviet Union disintegrated.]
Top of the World
…[Anatolii Artsebarski’s] crewmate, Sergei Krikalyov 1, was no different. Tall and thin for a Russian, Krikalyov had a young, friendly face with features suggestive of Tom Cruise. Like Artsebarski, he had an easy smile and a good-natured disposition. But like Artsebarski, when he wanted to focus on the job at hand, the smile faded, the eyes sharpened, and the task became the be-all and end-all of life. Over the next few years, this ability to focus would make Krikalyov one of the most sought-after spacefarers, chosen repeatedly to fly some of the most important landmark missions to occur on either Mir or the International Space Station.
[1 Unlike most Russian names, Krikalyov’s name in English is not spelled phonetically. The correct pronounication is kri-kal-YOFE]
Born in Leningrad in August 1958, Krikalyov had watched the 1960s space race as a child, and not surprisingly, had been inspired by it. By the time he was in high school he had decided that, of all careers, being a cosmonaut would be best of all. Krikalyov’s logical mind told him, even as a teenager, that his chances of getting into space were slim, if not impossible. Rather than aim directly at becoming a cosmonaut, he would keep space flight as a distant goal, while training himself in a wide range of activities, all applicable to going in space. “This way, at least, my work would be interesting.”
He joined his high-school swim team, becoming one of its best athletes. He studied engineering, figuring that this training would be mandatory in space. He joined the local Leningrad flying club, learning to pilot and maintain airplanes and competing in airplane acrobatic events. Then, he graduated college first in his class. “In Soviet times, people were assigned to their job after college. If you had good grades, you had more choice.” Having read a newspaper article describing how numerous cosmonauts got their start working at the Korolev design bureau, now renamed Energiya, Krikalyov chose Energiya.
There, he was assigned the job of writing the procedures that cosmonauts follow when they use equipment, a job that at first disappointed him. He had wanted to build hardware, and instead he was doing paperwork. “I was luckier than I knew,” he reflected. If he had gotten a job designing bolts, he would have learned only how to design bolts. Writing procedures gave him hands-on experience with almost every piece of equipment used on manned vehicles. It gave him the opportunity to go to many launches. It got him involved in the efforts to solve almost every problem on Salyut-6 and Salyut-7, including the gas leaks on both vessels and the docking procedures used by Dzhanibekov to dock with Salyut when it was dead in space.
By 1985 he was accepted into the cosmonaut program, passing his exams one year later and becoming a full-time cosmonaut one year after that. Just 12 months later he was assigned his first flight, on the crew that relieved Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov at the end of their year-long mission. His quick assignment occurred partly for the same reason Manarov had gotten his assignment – the shortage of cosmonauts caused by the medical commission decree that every man had to undergo more stringent testing after Vladimir Vasyutin’s prostate problems on Salyut-7 in late 1985.
It also occurred because Krikalyov had made himself superbly qualified to fly in space. Though he had always kept his dream of space flight distant and removed, his wide-ranging campaign to train himself in every possible skill a cosmonaut could ever need had made him one of the world’s best possible candidates. Energiya officials would have been foolish to pass him by.
In orbit with Artsebarski on election day, June 1991, he listened as the capcom explained how they should submit their votes. Each was to submit his choice using a secret code letter. The capcom, the only other person to know what candidates the letters stood for, would then relay their votes to election officials.
Artsebarski voted for Yeltsin. “I liked Yeltsin’s apparent openness,” he remembered. Maybe he could bring some of that openness and honesty to Russian society.
Krikalyov did what he had done in March 1989 when he was on Mir during the elections for the first Congress of People’s Deputies. He abstained, choosing “none of the above.” To his analytical engineer’s mind, he simply didn’t think he knew enough about any candidate to make a rational choice. Moreover, he was uncomfortable with the possibility that some people on the ground might use his vote for political purposes. “Making a decision without good information would either be guessing, or an attempt to gain some kind of political advantage.” He didn’t want to do either.
In space for almost a month, both men had begun preparing for an arduous series of space walks planned for the next five weeks, possibly the most ambitious construction project ever attempted in space. Their primary goal, after they had replaced the missing Kurs antenna dish, was to assemble a 46-foot-long girder (named Sofora after a fast-growing Asian shrub) on the top, or dorsal, side of Kvant. Unlike previous orbital installations (such as the Strela crane), this girder was not preassembled and ready to mount. Sofora had to be put together in space, on the outside of Mir, by men in spacesuits. If Sofora was built successfully and proved strong enough to withstand the rigors of space, a thruster engine would be installed on its peak. In this position, about 50 feet from the station’s main axis, the engine would use about 85 percent less fuel in orienting Mir than the small attitude jets located on the circumference of the core module’s s ervice donut.
First on the agenda was the damaged docking system. On June Artsebarski and Krikalyov climbed out of Kvant-2’s airlock and clambered across Mir’s growing structure to Kvant. At the damaged Kurs antenna, Krikalyov looked at the base of the missing dish puzzlement. “It looked like the dish had been carefully removed, not kicked off like Manarov thought.” There were no broken pieces, torn metal. Later, Krikalyov theorized that the dish, which spins when in operation, had slowly worn its screw holes wider and wider until the whole unit simply spun itself off its mount and out into space.
Using a variety of tools, including a dentist’s mirror, Krikalyov removed the base of the missing dish and attached the new antenna in its stead. The work was slow. As usual, weightlessness made it difficult for Krikalyov to get any leverage, even with Artsebarski giving him support. The screws were very tiny. They been glued in place to keep them from loosening. Because the screws were so small and delicate, Krikalyov could work only during night. And the screws were not the only problem. The electrical connections to the dish mount had to be unplugged, and they were tiny, and scaled with both glue and wire. “Some engineers in ion control believed them impossible to work with.” By the Krikalyov was done, his hands were very, very tired. “It was delicate work, with very bulky gloves.”
This repair completed, Krikalyov and Artsebarski spent the three weeks preparing for the installation of Sofora, which was quite different from the girder assembled by Kizim and Solovyov during the last two space walks on Salyut-7. That girder, which had unfolded like an accordion and whose hinges then locked mechanically, had proved to be too weak and shaky. Sofora’s design was almost science fiction in concept. It comprised 21 sections, each a 1.5-foot cube of pipes to be assembled in space by the two cosmonauts. The sections were to be attached to each other by sleeve joints made of an unusual alloy of nickel and titanium that somehow, when heated, “remembered” and reverted to its original size and shape. To link two pipes, a sleeve of this alloy was fitted around two pipe ends. Then an electrical current heated the sleeve, which then “recalled” that it originally had a smaller diameter, and shrank to that size, thereby tightening and locking the two pipe ends into place. It was hoped that these joints would be sturdier than the mechanical hinges tested by Kizim and Solovyov.
To reduce their outside work, and to gain practice in assembling the sections, the two men assembled the first section inside Mir. Once outside, this section would become the top of Sofora, with each of the remaining 20 added to its base. Artsebarski, confident that Sofora’s construction would go well, then added to this section his own personal embellishment. Months before launch, during the simulations in the Star City water tank, Artsebarski had gotten the idea that, like construction workers worldwide, they should celebrate the assembly of Sofora by hoisting the Soviet flag to its top. Vice immediately requested the creation of a flag made of space-hardened materials. No one objected, but no one did anything to make it happen. Despite repeated requests, when he and Krikalyov arrived in Baikonur for launch there was no flag ready for them. In desperation, Artsebarski asked a friend to go into nearby Lenisk and buy an ordinary silk Soviet flag. Then, he snuck the 3-foot by 6-foot flag onto Soyuz-TM, since neither he nor Krikalyov had permission to carry its extra weight into space.
With Sofora’s first section complete, and destined to become the girder’s peak, he and Krikalyov fastened the flag to it. To keep the flag unfurled in the windless vacuum of space, they sewed poles along its edges.
On July 15, the space walks began. Like clockwork, they were scheduled to occur one after another, once every four days through the end of July. In the first space walk, the goal was simply to get their work platform attached to Kvant. For four hours they dragged the 150-pound platform across to Kvant. There, they fitted the platform to the fixtures originally used by the rocket shroud that had protected Kvant during launch.
As they worked, both ground controllers and Artsebarski noticed that his spacesuit was losing air at a higher than normal rate. The suits the two men were using had been in space since 1988, brought to Mir by the Afghan flight during Titov’s and Manarov’s year-long mission. In that time Artsebarski’s suit had been used the most, 10 times, logging more than 60 hours total.
Trying to pin down the source of the leak, Artsebarski looked at the suit’s gloves, and noticed how abraded and worn they were. After all that use, his oxygen supply was literally dribbling away through his fingertips. To prevent further air loss, he activated the suit’s special emergency wrist cuffs. Though uncomfortable, the cuffs prevented him from suffocating. He and Krikalyov needed to finish their work. He could always replace the gloves later.
The next space walk took place as scheduled on July 19. Krikalyov scrambled to Strela’s controls and manually swung Artsebarski, the first two boxes of Sofora girder parts, and the already-assembled first section over to Kvant. They then locked the first section into the work platform and began adding girder pipes to it. Once a new section was finished, they moved everything sideways and attached a new section to the growing structure. Step by step, they built Sofora outward toward Mir’s aft, parallel to Kvant and the core module. Once completed, the almost five-story-long girder would be hinged upward so that it rose above Kvant almost vertically.
Both men discovered that the footholds on the work platform were useless, positioning the cosmonauts farther from the work area than during simulations in the water tank on Earth. They instead had to hold themselves in place by hand and foot, an awkward and difficult technique in weightlessness. To keep to their schedule the men continued to work even after the sun had set. When they finished this space walk they had managed to assemble three sections of Sofora, while also videotaping their work for ground engineers.
Four days later, they were outside again, using Strela to move another 11 sections across from Kvant-2 to the outside of Kvant. In the days between they had preassembled as much as they could of each section, and by the end of this space walk all 11 sections were added, bringing the girder’s length to more than 32 feet long, its far end reaching almost past the service module on Soyuz TM-12 docked to Kvant’s port.
Finally, on July 27, 1991, they added the last six sections an hinged the entire 46-foot-long truss upward into position, hoisting the blood-red hammer and sickle flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics upward as well. To test the girder’s rigidity, Artsebarski started climbing it, rung by rung. At each section he stopped, shook the girder gingerly to satisfy himself that it was firm, and then went on. Soon he was at the peak. Held open by metal posts, the hammer and sickle flew beside him, high above both Mir and the earth. Magically, and quite unintentionally, at that moment the dream of a five-year-old boy, imagining that the red Soviet flag was emblazoned on the side of an orbiting satellite, had come true.
Artsebarski looked down Sofora’s five-story length, aiming his television camera at Krikalyov floating near the girder’s base. Spreading out below him hung the entire station, its erector-set modules and solar arrays silhouetted by the earth and the vast green and brown territory of the Soviet Union pecking out through white clouds.
Then, to Artsebarski’s alarm, fog began forming on his visor. Soon he could barely see anything. He gripped the girder in momentary fear and radioed to Krikalyov what was happening. Despite having a new spacesuit available, Artsebarski had gotten permission to use the old spacesuit one more time, “as an engineering test.” The trip to the top of Sofora had overloaded its aging thermal system so that it could no longer absorb the moisture from his body, which instead condensed on his visor. In less than a few minutes, Artsebarski was blind, floating at the top of arguably the highest masthead ever built by man.
Very quickly the two men worked out a plan. By jutting his chin out and rubbing it against the visor’s base Artsebarski was able to clear a tiny area. Slowly and carefully, his eyes angled downward to peek out this small opening, he worked his way down the girder while Krikalyov climbed up. They met in the middle and Krikalyov took the video camera from him, carefully untangling its electrical cord that had gotten wrapped around Artsebarski’s body. Then, while Artsebarski waited in hope that his vision would clear, Krikalyov climbed to the top of Sofora himself. “I wanted to test Sofora.” Floating beside the flag, he shook the truss, and satisfied himself that it was solid and rigid. Then he came back down and joined Artsebarski. Together, they worked their way down Sofora, across Strela, and back inside Mir.
At the top of Sofora the hammer and sickle hung proudly in space. On the ground a Soviet television commentator noted that he could understand why the two cosmonauts had risked their lives to make this gesture. “After all, our country has not totally fallen apart yet. There are still things which we do better than anyone else in the world.” For this one last shining moment, the communist empire ruled all of outer space.
But only for a moment. Everything was about to change.
The last Soviet citizen
[Pages 317-325]
…In space, Krikalyov and Artsebarski could only listen and wait. Ground controllers alternately relayed broadcasts from the pro-coup Soviet Central Television and the anti-coup Russian radio. Neither man made any public comment about the events in Moscow, fearful of unknown consequences. Better, they both felt, to stay focused on the job at hand.
The entire Soviet space program rolled on as well with the same kind of tunnel vision. On August 21, even as the coup was dissolving and a Russian plane was flying to Sochi to rescue Gorbachev, a new Progress-M freighter was launched from Baikonur, carrying supplies as well as, of all things, two specially designed Coca-Cola soda dispensers. Though built partly to see if carbonated soda could be poured in some fashion in weightlessness (a similar dispenser had first been tested on the shuttle Challenger back in 1985), the handheld units were as much an advertising ploy as anything, paid for in cold cash by Coca-Cola to Energiya.
Krikalyov was not interested in appearing on tape doing a cheap publicity stunt. He volunteered to be cameraman, leaving the dispenser testing to Artsebarski. It was Artsebarski’s responsibility as commander anyway. With a bemused grin, he spritzed Coke into his mouth, first right-side up, then upside down. So, while the last two Soviet cosmonauts drank Coca-Cola in space, the Soviet Union dissolved on Earth – though it would take another five months before everyone realized it.
The two men on Mir dealt with the uncertainty of their situation and their nation in different ways. Artsebarski, the more romantic and philosophical of the two, found ways to relax by using the indescribable gentleness of weightlessness. Late during their sleep hours, when all was quiet, he would get out of his small cabin in the core module and head to Kvant-2, which had the largest window on Mir. There, nude, he’d float motionless, his arms floating limp before him, his head turned so that he could stare out into the emptiness of space. If the station’s orbit was in nighttime, he’d gaze at stars in endless numbers, dwindling down, smaller and fainter, until they seemed to fill even the sky’s uttermost blackness like a fine haze. As he hung there in the darkness with only Mir’s fans whirring in the background, he could hear his heartbeat: ba-bom… ba-bom… ba-bom. Soon, each beat would gently shake his weightless body, and he’d begin to rock back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. There was nothing but the quiet fans, his heartbeat, and the endless innumerable stars. “Compared to this universe,” he thought, “A man is absolutely insignificant.”
Krikaley, more pragmatic, tried to take the situation in stride, joking about it with mission controllers. During the uncertain weeks following the coup, strange rumors about the future of the space program circulated through mission control and up into Mir. At one point the capcom kidded Krikaley, telling him that, to raise cash, Energiya was going to sell Mir to NASA, lock, stock, and barrel.
Krikalyov joked back, “Are they going to include us in the deal?”
Ironically, and to Krikalyov’s misfortune, there was some truth to these rumors. That summer, during the first Sofora assembly space walk, Energiya officials had announced that the next two Soyuz missions had been combined because there was not enough money to build and launch both spacecraft. The original plans had called for flights in October and November, 1991. The first flight was to carry an Austrian, Franz Viehbock, his ticket paid for with $7 million in cash by the research firm Joanneum. Also on that flight were to be Artsebarski’s and Krikalyov’s relief crew, Alexander Volkov and Alexander Kaleri.
The second flight was to carry a West German, also a cash-paying customer, and Toktar Aubakirov of Kazakhstan. The All-Union Treaty that Yeltsin had negotiated to replace the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States, once signed, would make Kazakhstan independent, putting the Soviet spaceport Baikonur on foreign territory. To ease relations with Kazakhstan, the Russian government had offered it its own weeklong space mission, similar to the Intercosmos missions to Salyut-6 back during the Brezhnev years.
The shortage of cash, however, forced Energiya to rearrange this flight schedule. There simply wasn’t enough money to send up a mission that merely visited the station for a week and then returned home. Each flight had to provide a crew change. Thus, the November mission was delayed to spring 1992, when the next crew change was scheduled. Furthermore, Aubakirov’s assignment was shifted forward to the October 1991 mission, bumping Krikalyov’s crew relief, Alexander Kaleri. Since the Kazakh was not trained to stay in space for six months, Krikalyov would have to remain in space for two consecutive crew shifts.
Before these changes were announced, Valeri Ryumin, as head of the Mir program, got on the radio and asked Krikalyov if he was willing to do it. In his typical analytical manner, Krikalyov evaluated the situation. He realized that if he said yes to Ryumin, it would mean that he accepted the responsibility of finishing the mission. If he later asked to come home early, they would certainly oblige him, but consider it a failure on his part. He knew that the tough and blunt Ryumin, who had himself agreed to lengthen his first mission so that he could do a space walk and remove the antenna stuck on Salyut-6, would neither forgive nor forget.
Then, he considered his new crewmate. That Alexander Volkov had been his commander on his first space flight in 1989, and that they had gotten along well then, made staying seem somewhat less painful.
Finally, as a former long distance swimmer, he knew the limits of his stamina, how to pace himself for a long, hard, endurance test. The trouble was, his mission had become a long-distance race in which, halfway through, the distance had been almost doubled. “I had to estimate my remaining strength,” he remembered. “I decided I had to slow down, to pace myself. As an athlete I could make that judgment.”
So on October 4, 1991, Soyuz TM-13 arrived at Mir, carrying what was now an international crew, Alexander Volkov of the soon-to-disappear U.S.S.R. (though he noted in a prelaunch press conference that he had been born in the Ukraine, and could actually represent that country as well), Toktar Aubakirov of Kazakhstan (though he had been a Soviet air force pilot his whole working life), and Franz Viehböck of Austria.
For six days the five men worked together. Then Artsebarski said goodbye to Krikalyov, giving him a high-five as he exited through the hatch, joining Aubakirov and Viehböck in their return to Earth. For Artsebarski, the separation was wrenching, as if he were abandoning his partner. Shortly after Krikalyov had spoken to Ryumin, Artsebarski had tried to persuade his own boss, Shatalm, to let him stay longer. “It would be much better to keep the crew intact,” he had said. Shatalov politely disagreed. As he descended to Earth, Artsebarski decided that his mission wouldn’t be truly over until he saw his crewmate safely back on the ground.
Five days after Artsebarski left, Volkov and Krikalyov boarded Soyuz TM-13 to move it from the bow to the aft port. With Volkov doing the flying, they made repeated approaches, testing the new Kurs antenna at the aft port. Satisfied that it was working, Volkov then let the system complete an automatic docking.
During the next few months, Krikalyov and Volkov watched as the nation they had grown up in dissolved below them. Not only did 11 of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics become independent nations linked together in a so-called Commonwealth of independent States, 4 republics refused to join even this as Georgia and the Baltic states declared that they wanted nothing to do with their former oppressors.
On Christmas Eve 1991, the Soviet Union was removed from the United Nations, with Russia taking its seat on the Security Council. The next day, Mikhail Gorbachev sat before television cameras and announced his resignation, followed 24 hours later by a declaration by the upper chamber of the Soviet Union’s Supreme Soviet that the Soviet Union no longer existed. After almost three-quarters of a century, the utopian dreams of the communist revolution had dissolved into nothing.
On board Mir, the two men continued the routine of previous long-term missions. They used one of the station’s furnaces to produce semiconductor crystals of gallium arsenide, smelted samples of germanium and cadmium sulfide, made X-ray observations of the black hole candidate Cygnus X-1, and gathered data on the environment surrounding the orbiting laboratory. They also continued the tediously boring regimen of two hours of exercise per day.
They contended too with what was now an aging space station. Though Mir (with two new modules) had three times more habitable space than when Krikalyov and Volkov were there together in 1989, miscellaneous equipment cluttered every module. Hoses and wires hung everywhere. The Kvant module, originally dubbed an “astrophysics laboratory” when launched in 1987, had instead become the station’s storage “attic,” located as it was at the aft end of the base block, or at the “top” of the station depending on your point of view. Many of its telescopes no longer worked, and since it was where crews unloaded Progress freighters and filled them with garbage, crews dumped old, unwanted equipment there, leaving only enough room for them to get to the aft docking port.
Worse, some of the station’s equipment was ailing. Only seven of the original twelve gyroscopes on Kvant and Kvant-2 still functioned. Several storage batteries had failed, reducing the station’s power capacity. The station’s solar arrays degraded about 5 percent per year, and now produced only between 10 and 20 kilowatts of power, depending on the orbit and the available sunlight. And after more than five years in orbit, the plastic windows on the base block had become blurry from the cumulative impacts of micrometeoroids.
Moreover, the first of their two cargo ships, arriving in October and using the bow port, required two docking attempts, two days apart, before it managed to dock successfully. Then, when it came time for it to leave, it could not because some of Mir’s gyroscopes had failed, once again causing attitude-control problems. Krikalyov and Volkov had to spend a day rewiring the gyros to get them to work so that Progress could undock.
The second cargo ship, arriving at the end of January 1992, had no such docking problems, but its launch was almost delayed because of a threatened strike by unpaid employees at mission control. People in Baikonur had become so desperate that a riot broke out the next week, with four army barracks burned to the ground and three people killed when unpaid soldiers tried to ram a stolen car into their commandant’s office.
By early 1992, with the Soviet Union gone, it was unclear who owned the space program and its associated military operations.
Throughout the autumn of 1991, Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament had been taking control of some agencies and refusing to fund others, letting more than 80 ministries and departments wither away. Both Glavkosmos and the Soviet Ministry of General Machine Building (which for 40 years had managed the space program) were abandoned, the administration of space taken over by the new Russian Space Agency. However, a system for paying salaries or expenses was not yet in place.
For Krikalyov and Volkov, the second cargo ship was important because it was supposed to bring tools and spare parts to repair the station’s failed gyros, as well as fuel, food, letters from home, and, just as important, honey, requested by both men. (The station’s supply of honey had run out early in Krikalyov’s mission.) The tools, fuel, and letters were there, along with fresh onions, horseradish, and lemons. No honey, however. Though Krikalyov’s wife had purposely donated a jar of honey for her husband, there hadn’t been time or resources to test it to make sure it wouldn’t contaminate the station’s atmosphere. The chaos on the ground had made such tests difficult to accomplish. In fact, the chaos had made it difficult even to keep Mir supplied at all. In the last year or so the variety of meals on the station had dropped from about 300 to 100.
The shortage of cash on the ground had also forced the program to change its repair philosophy. Rather than replace many items that, though functional, had reached the limits of their expected operating life, Energiya officials decided that wherever Mir had sufficient redundancy, such as with batteries and its two Elektron recycling units, they would wait for parts to fail before replacing them. This approach, while increasing risks and long-term costs, would save the company money in the short run.
The collapse of the Soviet Union caused other problems. The fleet of ships that were used to provide communications links with Mir when it was above the ocean could not be used; there was no money to launch them, and their berths in the now-independent Baltic states were denied them. Ground stations in Kazakhstan and other former Soviet provinces were also closed when their hosts demanded rent for their use.
Moreover, the constellation of geosynchronous orbiting satellites, launched to replace the ships, were failing, and there was no money to replace them. And though one working satellite could still provide communications for most of the day, it belonged to the Soviet military, and they demanded rental money for its use, money that the Russian space program didn’t have. Thus, for the first time in several years, cosmonauts could communicate with the ground only when their orbit took them over Russia. On some days and orbits, they were incommunicado for up to nine hours.
Curiously, from the point of view of both the crew and ground control, this lack of communication had its advantages. It gave the crew more free time to work on their own, while saving money on the ground because not as many people were needed in mission control. “Every time you have to talk to mission control, you can’t do your work,” noted Krikalyov. More importantly, too much communication with the ground made the station and its crew less autonomous. If humans were going to travel millions of miles to other planets, where communications with Earth would be rare and difficult, they had to learn how to manage without help from Earth. “The lack of communications helped make Mir more self-contained, more self-sufficient,” noted Krikalyov.
Despite his confidence that he could pace himself to the end of his extended mission, by early 1992 Krikalyov was struggling. He had gotten married only a year before, and had an infant daughter [Ol’ga] on Earth who was now beginning to speak. Early in the mission, before Artsebarski had left, his wife had even joked how he should “Come back quickly or your own child will forget you.” With all that had occurred, Krikalyov wondered if that might actually happen. During a family session with his wife in January, he grumbled about how difficult it had become to do his work. In response she berated him gently, “Don’t overreact. My God, what to do? You’ve got to live somehow, to adapt. If you’re healthy, everything will be fine. You must take care of yourself, don’t forget about exercises.”
On February 20, the two men did their only scheduled space walk together. However, just after they opened the airlock hatch the heat exchanger on Volkov’s spacesuit failed. If he detached himself from Mir’s systems, the interior of his suit would fog up just as Artsebarski’s had in July. Rather than abort the space walk, Volkov stayed near the airlock and did the scheduled tasks for that area while Krikalyov climbed down Strela, across the base block and across to Kvant. There, he dismantled the work platforms he and Artsebarski had set up to assemble the Sofora girder and cleaned the lens of the docking television camera near the aft port.
Above him, Sofora rose five stories high, the flag that he and Artsebarski had raised still gleaming in the harsh sunlight. Wondering if Sofora was still as solid and rigid as it had been seven months earlier, Krikalyov decided to go up to its top again. He was also curious to get a closer look at the flag. Pulling himself hand over hand along the girder, he quickly reached its peak, mere inches from the flag.
Already the silk fabric showed signs of decay, almost as if something were eating away at it. There were tears along its length, and large sections were gone, dissolved away. What was left, including the hammer and sickle in the upper-left corner, looked like it couldn’t last many more months. Sofora, however, felt solid and sure. After more than a half-year in space, the joints of shapememory alloy still remembered their shape. Krikalyov took some pictures, then waved across at Volkov, whom he could see directly across from him at the Kvant-2 airlock, about 60 feet away.
On his way back, Krikalyov stopped at the dorsal solar panel on the core module and removed one of the test solar panels installed by Titov and Manarov four years earlier. By the time he and Volkov were back inside Mir, Krikalyov was very cold. “It took me such a long time to warm up afterwards.” Moreover, his fingers were once again badly irritated from working inside the thick spacesuit gloves. As he slowly warmed himself inside Mir, he consoled himself with the fact that he had accumulated more than 36 hours of space walk time, a record that would last for more than four years.
Finally, on March 17, 1992, Krikalyov’s relief was launched into space. Soyuz TM-14 blasted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, sporting Russian and German flags on the side of the rocket, and carrying Russians Alexander Viktorenko and Alexander Kaleri as well as German Klaus-Dietrich Flade. For the first time, Russian cosmonauts were flying under a Russian instead of a Soviet flag. Flade was a paying customer, his airfare of about $12 million paid by the now-unified German government. The former communist East Germany had been absorbed by West Germany in October 1990, and one of Flade’s trainers was Sigmund Jahn, a former communist cosmonaut who had flown to Salyut-6 in August 1978.
After spending seven days handing Mir over, Krikalyov, Volkov, and Flade returned to Earth. Krikalyov had completed 313 days in space, a record exceeded only by the 366 days flown by Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov, and the 326 days by Roman Romanenko.
On the ground, Anatoli Artsebarski, promoted to colonel in what was now the Russian military, was there to meet him, and to escort his former crewmate back to Star City. During the last five months he had gone to mission control every day, keeping tabs on his partner. When he was sent to the Crimea for post-flight recovery, he had taken his ham radio equipment with him so that he could talk with Krikalyov every night. Only now, with his crewmate safely back on Earth, did Artsebarski consider his mission “finally over.” On the flight home they talked of family and friends. Artsebarski tried to get Krikalyov to drink some cognac. “It’s medicinal,” he explained. Like many Russians, he considered a little alcohol to be healthy. Krikalyov, a pragmatic teetotaller who didn’t really believe such tales, took a sip out of courtesy to his friend, and stretched out to rest. After 10 months in space, the weight of Earth was heavy on his muscles. It was good to be home.
The country that Krikalyov returned to, however, was not the one he had left. His hometown had changed its name from Leningrad back to St. Petersburg. His college was now the St. Petersburg Mechanical Institute, instead of the Leningrad Mechanical Institute. His employer was now Russia, not the Soviet Union. His income was no longer guaranteed. His family’s apartment was unsure. His daughter’s school was unknown.
Everything had changed. Everything was unknown. The joys of freedom2 had descended upon what had once been the Soviet Union.
[2 Still refraining from sarcastic remarks.]
Chapter 11 – Mir: Almost Touching
[Extracts from Chapter 11, in which Sergei gets assigned to be the first Russian to fly on the Space Shuttle, without his say-so, and is sent off to America with only 2 weeks’ notice. And the NASA engineer who made fun of him deserves a punch in the nose!!! »:-(]
Going to Mars
[Pages 350-353]
…For Sergei Krikalyov, the experience was far more alien than spending 10 months in space. Everywhere he went, people smiled at him. When he drove a car down the road, the worker who waved him past a road construction site gave him a smile. When he went into a store to buy food, the cashier grinned at him. Even when he passed a security checkpoint, the guard examined his ID card, then smiled, and waved him through.
In Russia, no one smiled-unless they had good cause. To smile nonchalantly for little reason was considered rude, superficial, and a put-on. But Krikalyov was in America now, and in America everyone smiled, all the time, for the slightest reason. All his co-workers at NASA seemed to be laughing and grinning incessantly. It made him uncomfortable. 3
[3 From later on in the book, p. 379: “Moreover, while Krikalyov had been bothered in Houston by how frequently Americans smiled, the Americans in Moscow were equally disturbed by how all all Russians seemed to walk around with a perpetual scowl on their faces. To the Americans, Russians didn’t simply wear the light, empty, neutral look of subway-goers in cities like New York or Boston. Instead, they seemed to glower, their faces forever frozen in what appeared to be an expression of almost discomfort or anger. This sea of unhappy-looking faces made Americans feel uneasy and unsafe.” I wonder how Australians seem to overseas visitors – somewhere in between? :-)]
If, just three weeks earlier, someone had suggested to Krikalyov that he would spend the next three years in the United States, he would have thought they were crazy. And yet, here he was. And here he would stay, surrounded by relentlessly cheerful people, for the next three years.
In 1992, during the Bush-Yeltsin negotiations establishing on astronaut-cosmonaut exchange program, NASA officials had suddenly put the high-level Russian politicians across the table from them in an embarrassing position. According to Krikalyov, “…the Americans had listed several names of who they wanted to fly on Mir, and asked who the Russians intended to send to the shuttle.” No one in the Russian delegation had considered the issue that deeply. Moreover, the negotiators were politicians and diplomats, not members of the Russian space program, and really had no idea whom to propose. Frantic not to lose face, they quickly pulled out of thin air the names of two of their best-known cosmonauts: Krikalyov, the so-called “last Soviet citizen,” and Vladimir Titov, co-holder of the record for the world’s longest space flight.
Being picked in this ad-hoc manner caused Krikalyov some awkwardness. Not only were he and Titov given no say on whether they wanted to go, the decision had been made without input from anyone at Energiya, not even Ryumin, the man who usually made such selections. Later, Ryumin called Krikaley, wondering if he had played political games to get picked. He had not, but Ryumin was still irritated that he had not been involved in the decision. Furthermore, Krikalyov and Titov were given only two weeks to get ready. By November 13, 1992, they were in Houston, with their families following one week later.
“Too fast,” Krikalyov remembered. “Too fast.” While his English was rather limited, his wife Elena, an Energiya engineer, spoke none at all. Moreover, they and their three-year-old daughter were first lodged in a suburban apartment, where the typical resident used a car for the simplest of errands. The Russians, however, were used to living in an urban setting in Moscow, where they walked to everything or could take the metro or bus. For the first few months at least, Krikalyov’s wife spent most of her time at home, isolated and alone. “We could not go anywhere,” Krikalyov recalled.
Krikalyov often found American life downright jarring. At one point, soon after arriving in Houston, he got on an elevator with another American. As the NASA engineer pressed the button (he was going only one floor), he turned to Krikalyov, smiled, and said, “How ya doing?”
Krikalyov, still struggling with a new language, felt sudden panic. “How am I going to answer his question fairly,” he thought, “in a language I hardly know, in the short one or two minutes before we get to his floor?”
Nonetheless, Krikalyov tried, stammering out sincerely how much he liked America, how much he appreciated everything everyone was doing for him. He started to try to describe his apartment. The American watched with a grin. Then the elevator stopped at his floor, and with a hearty, “See ya later,” got out, leaving Krikalyov alone and in mid-sentence.
“I soon realized that Americans weren’t really expecting an answer,” Krikalyov explained. “In Russia, you only ask a question like that when you really want to know. Otherwise, you are considered rude. In America, however, it is merely a form of superficial greeting.”
Krikalyov noticed other things, both good and bad. He was amazed at the quantity and quality of food available in any supermarket. He was also appalled at Americans’ eagerness to eat in cheap fast-food restaurants. “In Russia, it is hard to get good ingredients, but when we do, we try to make good food with it. I was astonished how Americans take good ingredients and combine them so badly.”
To Krikalyov, as well as the many other Russians who came to the United States as part of the joint space program, the most negative aspect of American life was what they considered its almost superficial and shallow friendships. While Russians considered friendship intensely important, and spent years developing trust before they were willing to call someone their friend, Americans could say howdy to each other, drink a beer, and consider themselves lifelong buddies.
The happy-go-lucky grins and good-natured and easy friendships seemed to Krikalyov irritating, false, and artificial. “Are they putting on a front?” he asked himself. It also made it hard for the Russians to take Americans seriously, seeing them instead as ever-grinning clowns, to be laughed at.
However, for engineer Krikalyov the chance to fly on the American shuttle made all the cultural challenges worthwhile. Here was another kind of space vehicle, the first that was even partly reusable and the first able to come back from orbit and land on a runway. “I think every pilot who flies on some kind of plane wants to fly on another kind of plane,” he explained.
Krikalyov adapted well. Training was remarkably similar to how things were done in Russia. It included the same kinds of simulations, the same kinds of technologies (albeit more sophisticated), the same kinds of exercises, and the same kinds of procedures.
Ironically, he found NASA’s way of tightly scheduling every second of an astronaut’s time far more bureaucratic than anything he had experienced in his own country. In Russia, ground controllers made major scheduling decisions, such as when space walks and Progress dockings would occur, but left the more detailed day-to-day planning to the cosmonauts themselves. Twenty years of running three-month to six-month missions had taught them, as had Skylab’s longest mission taught NASA in the 1970s, that it was unwise to try to plan a spaceman’s day too tightly.
American shuttle missions, however, were short, rarely more than two weeks long. With so little time in space, mission controllers maximized efficiency by dictating the actions of every astronaut for every second of every mission. As Krikalyov’s own American shuttle commander admitted, “You might think that in Russia… [cosmonauts] are pretty rigidly controlled. Such is not the case. They have a lot more freedom than we do in deciding what goes on.”
Finally, after 15 months of hard training, Krikalyov joined five Americans for an eight-day mission. On February 3, 1994, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off, its mission to release three different satellite packages: a small, experimental science satellite built by the University of Bremen in Germany, a recapturable test factory for manufacturing thin and very uniform films in weightlessness, and a cluster of six small spheres, ranging from two to six inches in diameter, so that ground radar stations could test and calibrate their equipment. As one of two mission specialists in charge of using the shuttle’s robot arm, Krikalyov’s main technical assignments were to release the German satellite and recapture the test factory. Unfortunately, he was not able to do the second task. Technical problems prevented his crewmate Jan Davis from releasing the factory in the first place.
As usual, he was also expected to participate in several political public-relations gestures. On the mission’s sixth day the American television show Good Morning America put together a link between the ground, the shuttle, and Mir, so that the two crews could talk to each other and to the ground. Krikalyov made contact. “I hear you loud and clear,” he said in Russian. “Can you hear me?” As he spoke, a Good Morning America interpreter translated his words into English.
On Mir, the three Russians broke into laughter on hearing the English translation. Afanasyev opened his mike. “Sergei,” he asked innocently in Russian. “Why are you speaking English to us? Have you forgotten Russian?”
The next day, Krikalyov and the shuttle got a telephone call from Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. At one point, the Prime Minister also joked how the day before he had heard Krikalyov speaking only English to the Russian cosmonauts on Mir, and was wondering if he had “forgotten” his native language.
Krikalyov, ever-cautious when speaking with or about politicians, politely corrected the Russian Prime Minister, explaining that it was the English interpreter Chernomyrdin had heard. He then added that the Americans on Discovery were even learning a few Russian words. “In fact, they can pronounce many words without an accent,” he explained with a straight face.
Even as Krikalyov was learning the American way of flying in space, Valeri Polyakov’s 14-month-plus mission on Mir was getting up to speed. Following the collision on January 14, ground controllers had vacillated about whether they should have Afanasyev and Usachcev do an unplanned space walk to examine Kristall for any damage.
International Space Station: Ships Passing in the Night
[Pages 451-453]
For Sergei Krikalyov, a member of the station’s first crew, inaugurating the permanent occupancy of space merely continued his string of history-making flights. After his 1994 Discovery flight, he flew on the December 1998 shuttle flight that linked Zarya to Unity. On that same mission, he and American Bob Cabana activated the station and became the first two people to enter it, gliding in simultaneously as a gesture to the American-Russian partnership.
As one of ISS’s first full-time occupants, however, Krikalyov was strangely dissatisfied by what he found there. Unexpectedly, the new station seemed far more overcrowded and cluttered than Mir had been in its last days. Because of the long delay between the launch of Zarya and Unity and the arrival of the first crew, one extra shuttle supply mission had brought with it more equipment than the not-yet-complete station was ready to handle. “People forget that the station is made of metal, not rubber. It doesn’t expand,” said Krikalyov. “We were barely able to open the hatch.”
In addition, ISS’s design, though far more sophisticated than Mir’s, disturbed Krikalyov. Because the station was heavily computerized so that ground controllers could both monitor and maintain its operation, every piece of equipment required that computer system to operate. Krikalyov couldn’t even turn on the lights without booting up. This computerization, combined with the political deal that required both American and Russian mission control centers, meant that ISS needed more ground controllers than either Mir or Skylab. Instead of building a self-sufficient vessel able to sustain humans in space for long periods, the program had shifted its focus to creating jobs on the ground “to keep people busy,” noted Krikalyov.
…Interestingly, the station’s stronger ties to the ground did nothing to eliminate the communication rifts between the Earth and the station. For example, NASA’s extensive communication satellite network allowed Krikalyov to speak to ground controllers 24 hours a day. On Mir, the lack of geosynchronous satellites dedicated to station communications meant that communication sessions were short, occurring only when the station passed over Russia. While this limitation was often inconvenient, it also left the crew large blocks of free time to work, unbothered by ground controllers who wanted to pester them with questions. On ISS, Krikalyov found himself repeatedly distracted by questions from Earth.
In another example, during the shuttle supply mission in June 1999, required because Zvezda was not yet ready, the crew found that if they stayed inside ISS too long, they experienced headaches, nausea, and eye irritation. They could alleviate these symptoms only by returning to the shuttle for breaks. However, because the astronauts were reluctant to describe the problem over the public airwaves, they told no one on Earth about it during the flight, making it impossible for ground controllers to pinpoint the problem. When, during post-flight debriefings, the crew finally revealed what had happened, NASA engineers – no longer having a crew on board the station to check – could only guess that the symptoms stemmed from stagnant air inside the station and a buildup of carbon dioxide. To Krikalyov, the annoyances and design questions reflected only a more fundamental lack of clear purpose. He knew that all the earlier Soviet stations were designed to learn how to build interplanetary, self-suffici ent space vessels. Every change, every redesign, was done to make the next station more independent. “With Mir we almost had a closed loop,” he remembered.
ISS, however, does not have this goal. In fact, Krikalyov wasn’t sure what ISS’s true goal was. In order to save development costs, the American portion of the station had long ago abandoned any effort to make its oxygen and water supplies self-sufficient. Instead of recycling these supplies, U.S. modules depend on the Russian recycling systems, its own lithium perchlorate candles, or the shuttle to haul up tons of supplies. “The focus is lost,” said Sergei Krikalyov. “We don’t have a clear idea of what we are doing.”
Links
- A Zimmerman Bibliography: there is a page about his book at his site
- MSNBC: “ ‘Leaving Earth’: The space station’s future”
- UPI: Feature: Excerpt from Leaving Earth. (Found by Monica!)