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Michael Foale didn't notice last June when the bluebird began to chirp aboard the Mir space station. Ordinarily, anyone in the station's core module could not have missed the sudden trilling. But at the moment, Foale was elsewhere. And he had other things on his mind besides a singing bird...
Several weeks earlier, before Foale replaced astronaut Jerry Linenger aboard Mir, the TV camera had quit at the last minute in a practice run, and Tsibliyev--one of the space agency's best pure pilots--had narrowly averted disaster. Now, with Foale onboard, the TV system once again operating and Progress stabilized several miles away, ground control ordered Tsibliyev to try the same exercise again. "This is a bad business, Sasha," Tsibliyev said to Lazutkin as he picked at his food...
...Aboard Mir, "Get in the spacecraft" meant get in the Soyuz lifeboat, and get in the Soyuz lifeboat meant big trouble. There had not been a day in the 11 years Mir had flown that a sleeping Soyuz hadn't been parked at its docking port, ready to carry the crew back to Earth in the event of an emergency. But in those 11 years, there hadn't been a day when such an emergency had actually arisen. Now it looked as if it were going to, and it would be Michael Foale, the American guest, who would have...
...have to help Tsibliyev and Lazutkin into the Soyuz lifeboat. The cosmonauts, after all, had been certified to fly the Soyuz line of ships long before Foale had even got his first close look at one. What's more, even if they had needed assistance, there were other people aboard the station today to handle the job. Earlier in the week, cosmonauts Anatoli Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov had arrived in a Soyuz of their own to relieve the two Russians. Foale would be going home too, but his ride aboard a U.S. shuttle wouldn't arrive until October...
Jeffrey Kluger is the co-author with Jim Lovell of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, on which the movie was based For more of Foale's harrowing experiences aboard Mir, visit time.com...