Word: mir
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...when he turned to the portal that led to Soyuz in order to begin prepping the ship, he was brought up short by the spaghetti of cables and ducts that confronted him. These are the umbilicals that carry power and air from Mir to Soyuz. To free up the spacecraft, Foale would first have to remove them all and switch the ship over to internal power...
...Foale began wrestling with connections, Lazutkin appeared alongside him and started doing the same with the cables running into Spektr. But why? As far as Foale could tell, there was no way to determine where Progress had struck Mir. Lazutkin seemed to have assumed that the Spektr lab was leaking, and he was trying to seal it off. But what if he had guessed wrong? The noise from the Klaxon prevented Foale from speaking to Lazutkin, so all he could do was finish clearing the Soyuz hatch and then move on to Spektr to help his crewmate. When the Klaxon...
...Lazutkin said simply. "It was Spektr." Within half an hour, Lazutkin and Foale cleared the cables, unstowed the hatch and slammed the module shut. At one point Foale held the hatch in place by hand like the Dutch boy at the dike. Mir's hemorrhaging at last stopped, but how badly the ship had been hurt was impossible to tell...
Within 30 minutes, all three men were back in the main module. With Spektr sealed and the station repressurized, they had time to assess just how much ship they had left. It did not look like much. Mir had lost all the power that once flowed from the Spektr's solar panels. Worse, the other panels on the ship were also out of commission. The collision had knocked the station into a slow roll, tipping its huge, energy-producing wings out of alignment with the sun. Unless the ship got realigned, it couldn't produce power. And unless the ship...
...ground, this was good news. One degree was a small enough drift for mission control to correct remotely. Bypassing Mir's unconscious computer system, the controllers sent up a command instructing the station's engines to light. An instant later they did, and the groaning old spaceliner came slowly to a stop...