Mir Crew Has Long History Of Death-Defying Repairs

They’ve defied danger before out in the deadly vacuum of space: sawing through a station hull to fix a leaking fuel valve back in 1984 and almost getting stuck outside Mir in 1990 because of a bent hinge on a hatch.

This time, spacewalking cosmonauts may have to enter a ruptured, decompressed lab to salvage enough power to keep Russia’s Mir station aloft.

The question is: Will they be able to pull it off?

Indeed, one of Mir’s cosmonauts voiced skepticism Friday when told he’d have to venture next month into the Spektr lab module, sealed since it was smashed by a runaway cargo ship on Wednesday.

He said it would be impossible for a man in a pressurized spacesuit to fit through the hatch.

“That’s what the training session is for,” came the curt reply from Russia’s no-nonsense Mission Control outside Moscow.

NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, a former Mir resident who took the first and only U.S.-Russian spacewalk in April, said a big spacesuit in such a small area would be a tight fit. “It’s going to be tough,” he said.

Russian flight controllers are proposing that commander Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin remove Spektr’s sealed hatch and connect power cables to desperately needed solar batteries inside. They would replace the hatch with an onboard spare, modified so the cables can poke through without exposing the rest of the station to the vacuum of space.

It’s unclear how far the cosmonauts could enter Spektr, filled with experiments that may have burst when the module depressurized. The module has no portholes, so the spacewalkers would have to rely on their helmet lights to see inside.

NASA astronaut Michael Foale would wait inside the attached Soyuz escape module, ready to make a quick getaway with the two cosmonauts if necessary. Most of the station would be sealed off during the spacewalk to keep it pressurized.

To be sure, cosmonauts have faced daunting spacewalks before.

Two cosmonauts perched outside Russia’s Salyut-7 space station used a knife in 1984 to cut through the hull to fix a leaking fuel valve. To prevent their pressurized suits from being ripped - which almost certainly would mean instant death - they put blankets over the jagged edges of the hole.

It took five spacewalks to fix the leak.

Six years later, aboard Mir, two spacewalking cosmonauts had to go out to repair insulation on their docked Soyuz capsule. Unaware that a hinge on the station hatch got bent when it was opened, they went about their arduous work, almost exhausting their air supply.

They couldn’t close this outer hatch when it came time to re-enter the station. As a result, they had to close the inner hatch by itself and hope for the best. It worked.

“They’ve had some adventures out on spacewalks,” Smith said.

What’s more, Tsibliyev and Lazutkin have had an extremely stressful past five months. They battled a terrifying fire in February, and lost their primary oxygen generators in March and their main carbon-dioxide removal system in April. Things were just settling down when the cargo ship slammed into Spektr during a redocking test.

Since then, the crewmen have had to work in a dark, humid and eerily silent station, floating around with flashlights in their mouths to see and keep their hands free.

Mostly, they’ve been charging the remaining solar batteries, and have begun to restart some of the equipment that was turned off after the collision to conserve energy.

“Slowly, slowly,” Foale said Saturday, “we’ve gotten things back together.”