Word: spektr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...commander, Vasili Tsibliyev, had attempted to bring an unmanned cargo vessel in for a remote-control docking. When the ship was just a few yards from the station, it suddenly flew wide of the docking port, sideswiped one of the station's solar panels and slammed broadside into its Spektr science module. The collision punctured the Spektr's hull, releasing its atmosphere, and sent the entire station into a slow roll. For several days the lives of the crew members--as well as the future of the Russian space program--were in grave doubt...
Tsibliyev liked his romance tunes and played them whenever he could. But after the commander's blue mood last night, Foale had not expected to hear them this morning. Wriggling out of his sleeping bag in the Spektr science module and drifting into the main module, he saw that Tsibliyev looked positively jaunty. Instead of his usual rumpled jumpsuit, the commander was wearing his stiffer, more formal dress jumpsuit. The fabric no doubt itched, but Tsibliyev was a pilot first, and today he had a piece of flying to do. He wasn't about to underdress for the occasion...
...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...