Word: stationed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...bird was not a real bird, of course. It was a small plastic model that broke into song when its switch was thrown. Lately it had begun singing whenever it was jostled, and on this day it got jostled hard. Just moments before, the station's 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...
Tsibliyev seemed distracted, thinking less about what he was doing tonight than what he would be doing tomorrow. Sometime in the morning, probably just before noon, the commander would lock his remote-control guidance system onto an unmanned Progress cargo ship hovering far away and bring it into the station for a docking. For a commander like Tsibliyev, steering a limber little ship like Progress toward a big whale of a target like Mir should not have been cause for worry, and ordinarily he would have been looking forward to the exercise. But tomorrow things would not be so ordinary...
Recently, Moscow had ordered a change in the way things were done in space. Newly independent Ukraine was overcharging Russia for its automated-guidance equipment, so rather than let that system steer the robot spacecraft to the red zone--the point 100 yds. from the station where the commander takes over--ground control wanted the crew to maneuver the ship all the way in using only a video camera mounted on Progress and a black-and-white television screen in the station's core module to guide...
...cooperation of all three crewmen. Tsibliyev would be at the helm in the core module, watching the monitor and operating the joysticks as the vessel approached. Lazutkin would be behind him, peering out a nearby window to call out the spacecraft's coordinates. Foale would be dispatched to the station's most distant module, the Kvant, where the unmanned ship would actually dock. Shining a laser range finder out the stern porthole, he would measure Progress's distance and report it through a headset to Tsibliyev. If everything went well, Foale would be the first to feel the slight bump...