Word: mir
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JUNE 25, EARLY EVENING To Foale, there was nothing more perversely beautiful than a dead spacecraft. It had been two orbits since mission control had stabilized Mir, but while controllers had been able to stop the station's rotation, they hadn't been able to point it toward anything useful. With the solar panels still in shadow, the cabin lights and instrument panels went dead, and the fans and pumps that gave the spacecraft the atmosphere of a low-decibel boiler room fell silent. Huddling together in the main module, Tsibliyev, Lazutkin and Foale spent a few serene hours watching...
...this kind of peace was not unlike the rapture that seizes the snowbound before they freeze to death. If the Mir crew members were going to save their station and perhaps themselves, they would have to get moving fast. Though the thrusters on Mir were powerless to make the sweeping maneuver necessary to orient the solar panels, the thrusters on the Soyuz might not be. Like a pickup truck pushing a tractor trailer, the little lifeboat just might be able to nudge the mammoth Mir far enough for its panels to catch a shaft of sunlight...
...doggedly for the sun. Finally, at well after midnight on the morning of June 26, an instrument panel flickered to life, then a cabin light. Behind the walls, a fan started to whir, and a pump started to pump. One system at a time, instrument by instrument, the battered Mir recovered. By 2 a.m., more than 14 hours after it had sustained an injury that should have claimed its life, the world's only operating space station was working again...
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...
...question "Kto vinovat?" (Who's to blame?) has long haunted Russia. Searching for scapegoats--be it at the behest of Bolsheviks, Stalinists or the Russian Space Agency--is a native tradition. But Vasili Tsibliyev, after surviving the premature judgment of Boris Yeltsin (who blamed Mir's woes on "the human factor"), has hit the ground fighting. "They can convict me," he says, "but what'll they do when the next crisis comes?" Though the new crew on Mir has been beset by their own troubles, Tsibliyev won't gloat. "If the crew weren't prepared, they...