For two months the battered Mir space station has been as much a ghost ship as a spaceship. Even as its crews have continued to live and work in four of its aging modules, its fifth--the once glittering Spektr lab--has remained dark and cold, ruptured by a collision with a cargo ship in June.
Last Friday Spektr flickered back to life. In a superbly executed internal space walk, Mir's new commander, Anatoli Solovyev, and his flight engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, floated into the airless lab and installed a new cable system that will provide electricity to Spektr and the rest of the power-thirsty station. "This is a super day," exulted NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who waited out the space walk inside Mir's Soyuz re-entry vehicle, the crew's lifeboat in case they had to abandon ship. "Well done, everybody."
The space walk was a welcome grace note in a week of too familiar problems for the pratfall-prone station. Four days before, the onboard computer failed--again. Shortly after, there was a touch-and-go moment as a cargo ship approached the station--again. Amid all this, the inevitable finger-pointing began. Russian President Boris Yeltsin suggested that recently returned crewmen Vasili Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin were largely responsible for the station's woes; at his postflight press conference, an indignant Tsibliyev denied the charge.
As for Mir, it's healthier than it has been all summer. But because of the damage to Spektr's hull, the science module is still uninhabitable by Foale or other NASA astronauts, for whom it normally serves as living quarters and science workshop. Though the listing Mir has taken a big step toward righting itself, its problems in space and on Earth are far from over.
The immediate goal of Friday's fix-it call was to install a new hatch on Spektr--one equipped with a cable assembly that would let the crew tap electrical power from the lab's solar panels while keeping the module sealed off from the rest of the station. Before the walk got started, NASA's Greg Harbaugh, who helped plan the exercise, played down its difficulty, brushing off news reports calling it the most dangerous EVA ever. "I don't think they get much easier," he said.
Not exactly. Shortly after Solovyev and Vinogradov donned their spacesuits and depressurized an airlock adjacent to Spektr in preparation for opening the airless lab's hatch, Vinogradov's left glove began leaking air. At first the cosmonauts were unconcerned, and a ground controller even joked as Vinogradov struggled to adjust his suit. "Pull it with all your proletarian force," he instructed.
But as the minutes slipped by--and air hissed from Vinogradov's limited supply--the leak stopped being a laughing matter, since a spacesuit rupture in a vacuum can be instantly fatal. Ultimately, Mission Control ordered the airlock repressurized and told the crew to scrounge up another glove and start all over.