No repairmen ever had so much riding on a service call as the two cosmonauts dispatched last week to fix Russia's crippled Mir space station. Commander Anatoli Solovyev, 49, and engineer Pavel Vinogradov, 43, must not only restore the station as a working orbital laboratory but also reassure their U.S. partners that Mir is safe enough to let Americans continue visiting it.
That won't be easy. Even as they approached Mir, the automatic docking system failed, forcing the cosmonauts to complete the linkup manually. Worse, the Russian Space Agency concluded that it won't be possible to fix Mir's broken oxygen generator...