THE BRIDGE | Summer 2017
10
Coming soon Icarus, film about Mike’s career
2017
inducted into US Astronaut Hall of Fame
2013
retired from NASA
2005
of the cargo ship was misjudged and it was unable to brake in time with the thrusters, resulting in a direct hit. The crash caused the air to rush out of the station, which meant we only had 23 minutes before being rendered unconscious. Communicating all the while in Russian, the flight engineer and I managed to pull cables out of the hatch and plug the hole to stop the air escape. Having saved the station from full depressurisation, we unfortunately ended up disconnecting a third of the station’s power supply, leaving the station with limited power, no communication with Earth and in an uncontrolled tumble. In space, due to the speed and orbit, one is in daylight for 45 minutes and darkness for 45 minutes. By the time we moved into darkness, the station had powered down completely and, due to the spinning, our solar rays were no longer pointing to the sun which meant there was no power to the batteries. Everything was completely silent, dead.
Those critical hours
made CBE for services to space exploration
1997 accident aboard Mir
1992
first space flight
1975
matriculated at Queens’
We had hours of discussion, watching the stars to orient our direction of spin. Oddly, the view out the windows during those few, critical hours was, to this day, the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in space: the Earth was radiating a stunning blue light and we were surrounded by complete darkness in the cabin. Our only option was to rotate the station using power from the Soyuz (our lifeboat). As it was our only escape, we were concerned about using too much fuel from the lifeboat; however, we took our one chance at salvation, fired the Soyuz thrusters, and managed to stop the uncontrolled movement. We also recalibrated our position to optimise the exposure to solar rays, permitting power to return. After nearly 30 hours, we re-established continuous power to the station and could finally communicate with ground control. It was a saga but really quite exciting, looking back. The repair process over the coming months was long and tedious. Because we’d disconnected so much power from the station, multiple modules were dead; water was freezing and coagulating in large cubic meter globs. I spent about two months on the damaged craft trying to extract dirty, slimy water from those modules. Needless to say, I didn’t do many experiments over that period. At the end of the Mir mission I participated in a Russian spacewalk to try and find the hole in the Mir Spekter module. The hole was inaccessible to us to find and repair, which was frustrating. It was the day they