The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

In June 1992 US President George Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to a pioneering space-co-operation agreement. One American astronaut would fly aboard the Mir space station; two Russian cosmonauts would fly aboard the US space shuttle.

In September 1993 US Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for Russia to help the US build a new International Space Station. As part of this agreement, NASA agreed to pay the Russian Space Agency $400 million to send five (later seven) astronauts to live aboard the Mir space station.

George Abbey was the NASA Director of Flight Operations involved in the development of the idea of merging the US and Russian Space Station programs. The program which was agreed was in three phases:

Phase One was a form of dress rehearsal consisting of seven four-and-a-half-month missions aboard the aging Russian space station Mir running from 1995 until mid 1998.

Phase Two would begin late in 1998 when the US and Russia would launch and lift the modules and components of a new International Space Station (ISS) requiring 43 separate missions, all assembled by EVA.

Phase Three would be the actual operation of the International Space Station (ISS).

Dangerous, emergency EVA aboard Mir

Burrough:

On 17 July 1990 two cosmonauts, Anatoli Solovyov and Aleksandr Balandin were on the Mir space station. They needed to repair loose thermal blankets on their Soyuz capsule before they could return to earth. To do this they had to make an emergency EVA. Neither had been specially trained for space walking. Their preparation had consisted of watching some videotapes of training in the swimming pool at the Star City cosmonaut training centre. They used Mir’s Kvant 2 airlock to exit.

Before exiting the hatch, they had taken a pressure reading in the airlock. Either their handheld pressure gauge malfunctioned, or they misread it, because when they bent to open the hatch, there was still some air remaining in the airlock. The hatch immediately slammed outward on its hinges with terrific force.

The two cosmonauts then proceeded with the EVA, which proved dicier than anyone had expected. Fixing the thermal blankets took far longer than anticipated, and the spacewalk degenerated into a repair marathon that stretched past six hours. The space suits Solovyov and Balandin wore had only been rated for six and a half hours of use; when the two cosmonauts reached that point, the ground urgently ordered them to return to the airlock. Leaving their tools and ladders at the work site, Solovyov and Balandin were forced to scramble back across the length of Kvant 2 in total darkness, an exceedingly dangerous transit.

It was only when they reached the airlock and crawled inside that Solovyov realized the hinge had been damaged. The hatch wouldn’t close behind them. By this point the cosmonauts had been in a vacuum for nearly seven hours, and it was imperative that they find a way back inside the station. Clambering back outside the airlock, they tried the seldom-used backup airlock farther down Kvant 2, which to their relief opened and closed behind them. The EVA lasted seven hours and sixteen minutes.

The outer hatch, however, remained open to space. Solovyov and Balandin tried to fix it during a second spacewalk a week later, but it still wouldn’t close tightly. Then they discovered that a piece of the hinge cover had broken and lodged between the hatch and its frame. Removing the broken piece, they were finally able to close and repressurize the hatch. Several months later a new team of cosmonauts returned and found the hatch impossible to permanently repair. Instead they attached a set of clamps to secure it in place.