Word: soyuz
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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...
Wordlessly, Foale reversed direction and raced toward the Soyuz. He was aware that at this very second, at least, there was no real reason to abandon ship. Yes, Progress was closing in, but Tsibliyev was at the controls, and hadn't he dodged just such a bullet only weeks...
...when Foale entered the spherical transfer node that connects the main module to Soyuz and the four other modules, he felt and heard a sudden, sickening thud. Somewhere on the outside of one of the station's modules, Progress had hit fast and hard. An instant later, a deafening Klaxon went off, a signal that Mir's electronic brain was also aware of the impact...
...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...
...flight engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, floated into the airless lab and installed a new cable system that will provide electricity to Spektr and the rest of the power-thirsty station. "This is a super day," exulted NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who waited out the space walk inside Mir's Soyuz re-entry vehicle, the crew's lifeboat in case they had to abandon ship. "Well done, everybody...