All systems go. That is the mantra. But in space, systems fail.
PBS just dropped the second episode of its miniseries Once Upon a Time in Space. Titled “The Russian Thing,” it dives into the harrowing near-disasters aboard the space station Mir. Specifically, the 1997 Mir collision crisis. We sat down with Michael Foale. He was there. He is a British-American astronaut who flew six missions before retiring in 2013.
He remembers the day vividly. May 25, 1995. Wait. No. May 25, 1997.
Why the Mir collision happened: saving money on radar
The incident began with a manual docking maneuver. It was supposed to be routine. It wasn’t. An unmanned Progress cargo ship hit Mir. It ripped a hole in the Spektr module.
Foale explains the root cause simply. Greed. Or rather, cost-cutting.
“The root cause of the accident was trying save money.”
Russian managers refused to pay Ukraine $2 million for a radar system. The radar was built in Ukraine. It would have provided critical data. Instead, Energia Corporation decided to run a test. They wanted a cosmonaut to dock manually from a massive distance. Six kilometers out.
This is absurd. No one docks manually from that range without radar. They used a Progress vehicle already filled with trash. It was slated for de-orbit anyway. A test run before it burned up in the Pacific.
It went wrong.
Cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliev couldn’t judge the velocity. He couldn’t ascertain the distance accurately in real-time. Without distance, you cannot calculate speed. The Progress came in too hot. Tsibliev had only one thruster set to stop it. He couldn’t extinguish the velocity.
The ship bounced off Mir. It crumpled part of the Spektr module. It bent a solar array. The joint cracked. Air began to escape.
How astronauts stopped the decompression in Mir
The scene inside was chaos. Hollywood wouldn’t dare script it this tight.
Foale, Tsibliev, and cosmonaut Alexander ‘Sasha’ Lazutkin had 23 minutes of oxygen. That’s it. They had to seal the leak and stop the station from spinning out of control.
They succeeded.
It required an internal spacewalk. They had to re-enter the depressurized Spektr module to reconnect cables. Sasha and Foale had disconnected them earlier to save the rest of the station. Now they had to go back in.
There was a complication.
Tsibliev was stressed. He hadn’t passed the medical test before the internal EVA. They wired him up for a heart monitor. He was out.
Enter Valery Ryumin. He was the head of the program. He called Foale.
“Michael,” Ryumin said. “Would you be willing to go in instead of Vasily?”
Foale knew the implications. Tsibliev felt responsible for the collision. He was taking the blame on his shoulders. It was unfair, Foale says, but it happened. Asking Foale to step in would have been humiliating for Tsibliev. It created a rift. A huge one.
Foale went in. They fixed it.
What happened after the 1997 space station crisis
Foale retired from NASA in 2013. His career spanned 30 years. Six shuttle missions. He misses it.
But retirement is different.
He couldn’t handle the envy. Younger astronauts had only flown once or twice. He had flown six. He felt done. He dreamed of being a guide on commercial flights, like Peggy Whitson or Michael Lopez-Allegria did on Axiom missions.
Now he lives in Texas. Among mountains.
He soars here too. Not in a spacesuit. But it is close enough. He rides his bike. He looks at the stars.
He is 69 years old now.
Was he optimistic about international collaboration? Naively, yes. Looking back at Once Upon a Time in Space, it looks like a fairy tale to him.
The radar cost $2 million. The station survived. The crew survived.
But the cost of cutting corners remains high.
Do we learn from these close calls? Or do we just keep pushing the boundaries until something breaks?
