The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Linenger gingerly crawled toward the airlock and within minutes joined Tsibliyev inside. They had been outside the station for five hours. Carefully closing the hatch behind them, Linenger heaved a giant sigh of relief. Later, when they had wriggled out of their spacesuits, Lazutkin cooked them a meal. The next day Linenger triumphantly e-mailed Sang:

“EVA pretty much flawless.”

The remaining three weeks of Linenger’s stay abroad Mir were spent finishing experiments, packing up and cleaning the station. On 17 May Atlantis arrived carrying Linenger’s replacement, Mike Foale.

Foale was the son of a Royal Air Force pilot who had been born and educated in the United Kingdom but was entitled to US citizenship because his mother was an American. He had an MA in Astrophysics and had worked for NASA in shuttle payload at Mission Control. He had been accepted as an astronaut candidate at his third attempt in 1987 and flew three shuttle missions between 1992 and 1995. When he arrived he was 40 and had worked very hard at learning Russian. He was scrupulous in becoming part of the crew’s routine by attending meals and communications sessions. Lazutkin remembered:

“We noticed these little things. What was different about Mike was he started studying everything right away. He said, ‘Show me how everything works.’ And we gave him things to do. He asked all the right questions. Mike amazed us by mastering [systems] theory sometimes better than we knew it. He was like a child, and he was growing, and he grew into a real cosmonaut engineer.”

Tsibliyev recalled:

“When Michael first came on the station, the three of us were sitting around the table, and Michael said, ‘I came here to make you happy with me.’ He didn’t say he came to make himself happy. He came to make us happy. The fact that he integrated into the crew was because of these qualities.”

There was another coolant leak. Lazutkin found it in a crack in a pipe in Kvant. When Tsibliyev got a globule of coolant full in the face it took him three days to recover. By this time he was already tired and stressed.

An unmanned Progress supply vessel crashes into Mir