A BAD DAY IN SPACE

By JEFFREY KLUGER/HOUSTON

Michael Foale didn't notice last June when the bluebird began to chirp aboard the Mir space station. Ordinarily, anyone in the station's core module could not have missed the sudden trilling. But at the moment, Foale was elsewhere. And he had other things on his mind besides a singing bird.

The Mir bird was not a real bird, of course. It was a small plastic model that broke into song when its switch was thrown. Lately it had begun singing whenever it was jostled, and on this day it got jostled hard. Just moments before, the station's commander, Vasili Tsibliyev, had attempted to bring an unmanned cargo vessel in for a remote-control docking. When the ship was just a few yards from the station, it suddenly flew wide of the docking port, sideswiped one of the station's solar panels and slammed broadside into its Spektr science module. The collision punctured the Spektr's hull, releasing its atmosphere, and sent the entire station into a slow roll. For several days the lives of the crew members--as well as the future of the Russian space program--were in grave doubt.

The mishap last summer was the most troubling incident in a troubling year for the geriatric Mir. Already the 11-year-old ship had experienced a breakdown in its oxygen system, a series of leaks in its cooling system and an onboard fire. In the months following the collision, there were power blackouts, repeated failures in the ship's flickering computer and even an alarming irregularity in Tsibliyev's heartbeat.

But it was the cargo-vessel accident that focused the world's attention on Mir--and on Foale. While Tsibliyev and his fellow Russian Alexander Lazutkin returned to Earth last August--having been relieved by two fresh cosmonauts--Foale did not get his ride home until a few weeks ago, when the shuttle Atlantis ferried up astronaut David Wolf to relieve him.

For the past two weeks, Foale, 40, has remained all but incommunicado, spending his time either with his family or at NASA debriefings. Last Thursday, however, he sat down with TIME for an exclusive interview, his first since returning from his nearly five months aloft. With the help of Foale's recollections, as well as those of his crewmates, it is now possible to piece together the events surrounding last June's accident and reconstruct humanity's most dangerous day in space in more than a decade.

TUESDAY, JUNE 24, EVENING Vasili Tsibliyev had more on his mind than eating his dinner. The Mir workday was over, and except for a few things that had to be powered down or mopped up, the crew had the evening to themselves. This meant they could linger over a Western-style meal of stew or beef at a tiny table in the main module--a welcome relief from the traditional Russian fare of warm borsch and jellied perch.

Tsibliyev seemed distracted, thinking less about what he was doing tonight than what he would be doing tomorrow. Sometime in the morning, probably just before noon, the commander would lock his remote-control guidance system onto an unmanned Progress cargo ship hovering far away and bring it into the station for a docking. For a commander like Tsibliyev, steering a limber little ship like Progress toward a big whale of a target like Mir should not have been cause for worry, and ordinarily he would have been looking forward to the exercise. But tomorrow things would not be so ordinary.

Recently, Moscow had ordered a change in the way things were done in space. Newly independent Ukraine was overcharging Russia for its automated-guidance equipment, so rather than let that system steer the robot spacecraft to the red zone--the point 100 yds. from the station where the commander takes over--ground control wanted the crew to maneuver the ship all the way in using only a video camera mounted on Progress and a black-and-white television screen in the station's core module to guide it.

Several weeks earlier, before Foale replaced astronaut Jerry Linenger aboard Mir, the TV camera had quit at the last minute in a practice run, and Tsibliyev--one of the space agency's best pure pilots--had narrowly averted disaster. Now, with Foale onboard, the TV system once again operating and Progress stabilized several miles away, ground control ordered Tsibliyev to try the same exercise again. "This is a bad business, Sasha," Tsibliyev said to Lazutkin as he picked at his food.

"It's all right, Vasili," Lazutkin said. "The engineers need this, and you can do it."

Tsibliyev nodded a slow no. "It's bad," he repeated. "It's a dangerous thing to do." Foale, the newcomer, thought it best to hold his tongue.

JUNE 25, EARLY MORNING Before he was fully awake, Foale could hear the Russian romance music playing. Despite the fog of sleep, he smiled. Tsibliyev, it was clear, was already up.

Tsibliyev liked his romance tunes and played them whenever he could. But after the commander's blue mood last night, Foale had not expected to hear them this morning. Wriggling out of his sleeping bag in the Spektr science module and drifting into the main module, he saw that Tsibliyev looked positively jaunty. Instead of his usual rumpled jumpsuit, the commander was wearing his stiffer, more formal dress jumpsuit. The fabric no doubt itched, but Tsibliyev was a pilot first, and today he had a piece of flying to do. He wasn't about to underdress for the occasion.

For Foale and Lazutkin too, the day would be a busy one. Bringing Progress in for a dead-reckoning docking would take the cooperation of all three crewmen. Tsibliyev would be at the helm in the core module, watching the monitor and operating the joysticks as the vessel approached. Lazutkin would be behind him, peering out a nearby window to call out the spacecraft's coordinates. Foale would be dispatched to the station's most distant module, the Kvant, where the unmanned ship would actually dock. Shining a laser range finder out the stern porthole, he would measure Progress's distance and report it through a headset to Tsibliyev. If everything went well, Foale would be the first to feel the slight bump as the eight-ton, 23-ft. ship barely kissed the far larger Mir.

As the crew prepared for the day, Lazutkin floated into the main module and rigged the television monitor that had so famously failed weeks before. He worked the cables with the skill of a snake charmer, hooking them up to the TV with an authoritative snap. "You're not going to have a problem this time," he reassured Tsibliyev. "The picture is not going to disappear."

JUNE 25, NOON Tsibliyev could always count on Lazutkin. When Sasha told you a piece of equipment was going to work, it usually did. Shortly before midday, the Mir crew gathered in the main module, and Tsibliyev sent a command to the Progress vehicle, instructing it to open its electronic-eye camera and train its gaze on the station. The camera responded, and moments later, the TV monitor, as promised, flickered to life. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin seemed pleased; Foale was decidedly less so.

It wasn't just that the image was fuzzy, which it was. And it wasn't just that it sparkled with static, which it did. It was that the mammoth Mir station, the putative target in this orbital skeet shoot, was all but invisible. The screen was filled with an image of a mottled Earth rolling below the station, while a tiny, pixilated smudge--Mir itself--vanished and reappeared as it flew from the white clouds to the black oceans and back again. Tsibliyev, however, saw even this small target as a good target. With little hesitation, he engaged one joystick and brought the cargo ship's thrusters to life. Somewhere above, the ship invisibly exhaled propellant and began descending toward the station.

As Foale watched the screen, Lazutkin watched the window and Tsibliyev worked his sticks, Mir grew steadily larger on the TV. Tsibliyev picked up a stopwatch and began to click off blocks of time. Measuring the solar panels of the station as they grew larger against a grid overlying the screen and making some quick calculations with the watch, he could estimate how fast the spacecraft was closing. Judging by Tsibliyev's apparent calm, Foale reckoned things were going well.

Foale reckoned wrong. When Progress was little more than 3,500 ft. away, Tsibliyev noticed the solar panels growing faster than they should. Saying nothing, he hit his joysticks hard, applying a propulsive brake. Progress kept coming. He hit the sticks again. The ship sped on. "Michael," Tsibliyev said to Foale, "try getting a range mark."

Foale bounded back into the Kvant module, peered out the porthole and saw that the ship had not yet moved within the limited aperture of the little window. He swam back into the core module. "Nothing," he said to Tsibliyev. "Sasha?" Tsibliyev said to Lazutkin. "Nothing," Lazutkin echoed from his window.

Nothing happening at the windows, however, did not mean nothing happening on the screen. Following Tsibliyev's now worried gaze, both Lazutkin and Foale could see that the station had all at once become huge, practically filling the screen at a distance of barely 150 ft. from Progress. "Try to get another range!" Tsibliyev shouted to both crewmen. As Foale sped toward Kvant, Lazutkin looked out his window and froze. There, at last, seemingly at arm's length, was the fast-closing Progress. "There it is already!" he shouted.

"It's not supposed to be approaching like that!" Tsibliyev answered.

"It's coming in!" Lazutkin called. "Fast!"

Tsibliyev took one more look at the screen and shouted to Foale, "Michael! Get in the spacecraft!"

Aboard Mir, "Get in the spacecraft" meant get in the Soyuz lifeboat, and get in the Soyuz lifeboat meant big trouble. There had not been a day in the 11 years Mir had flown that a sleeping Soyuz hadn't been parked at its docking port, ready to carry the crew back to Earth in the event of an emergency. But in those 11 years, there hadn't been a day when such an emergency had actually arisen. Now it looked as if it were going to, and it would be Michael Foale, the American guest, who would have to power up the ship and get it ready to fly.

Wordlessly, Foale reversed direction and raced toward the Soyuz. He was aware that at this very second, at least, there was no real reason to abandon ship. Yes, Progress was closing in, but Tsibliyev was at the controls, and hadn't he dodged just such a bullet only weeks ago?

But when Foale entered the spherical transfer node that connects the main module to Soyuz and the four other modules, he felt and heard a sudden, sickening thud. Somewhere on the outside of one of the station's modules, Progress had hit fast and hard. An instant later, a deafening Klaxon went off, a signal that Mir's electronic brain was also aware of the impact.

Foale did what he always hoped he would do in this situation: he forced himself to stand absolutely still. If the station's wound was a mortal one, the atmosphere inside would gush out of the ship, and Foale's ears would pop suddenly and painfully. If that happened, the pain would probably be one of the last things he would ever feel, as rapid depressurization would kill the crew almost instantly.

If the leak was slower, however, the popping would be slower too, more like the subtle discomfort one feels in an elevator or an airplane. To his relief, Foale could feel that the leak was indeed a slow one.

But when he turned to the portal that led to Soyuz in order to begin prepping the ship, he was brought up short by the spaghetti of cables and ducts that confronted him. These are the umbilicals that carry power and air from Mir to Soyuz. To free up the spacecraft, Foale would first have to remove them all and switch the ship over to internal power.

As Foale began wrestling with connections, Lazutkin appeared alongside him and started doing the same with the cables running into Spektr. But why? As far as Foale could tell, there was no way to determine where Progress had struck Mir. Lazutkin seemed to have assumed that the Spektr lab was leaking, and he was trying to seal it off. But what if he had guessed wrong? The noise from the Klaxon prevented Foale from speaking to Lazutkin, so all he could do was finish clearing the Soyuz hatch and then move on to Spektr to help his crewmate. When the Klaxon at last stopped, Foale turned to Lazutkin. "Why are we doing this?" he asked, out of breath.

"I saw it hit," Lazutkin said simply. "It was Spektr." Within half an hour, Lazutkin and Foale cleared the cables, unstowed the hatch and slammed the module shut. At one point Foale held the hatch in place by hand like the Dutch boy at the dike. Mir's hemorrhaging at last stopped, but how badly the ship had been hurt was impossible to tell.

JUNE 25, 1 P.M. Vasili Tsibliyev sorely wanted to leave the bridge. His ship was damaged; his crew was alone; and it was safe to assume that this, the ground's second experiment with seat-of-the-pants flying, was over.

But ground controllers had different ideas. "Stay at your post!" they ordered. Tsibliyev repeated his request a few minutes later, and was told again, "Stay at your post!" At NASA, once the sworn rival of the Soviet space program, such an order would probably not stand, not when the pilots being commanded were self-styled cowboys like Alan Shepard or Gordon Cooper. But the Russian program was a different beast, and cosmonauts learn early that the word of the ground is all but inviolable. Tsibliyev, despite himself, stayed at his post.

The crew had to find a way to replace the air that had been lost. While Foale remained behind in the transfer node to make sure the bolts holding the sphere together hadn't been damaged by the collision, Lazutkin unstowed a large tank of pure oxygen, wrestled it into the main module and, with Tsibliyev's help, opened its nozzle. Instantly, a loud, sibilant hiss echoed through the ship. Off in the node, Foale heard the noise and, knowing the difference between the sound of air entering a spacecraft and the sound of air leaving it, heaved a relieved sigh.

Within 30 minutes, all three men were back in the main module. With Spektr sealed and the station repressurized, they had time to assess just how much ship they had left. It did not look like much. Mir had lost all the power that once flowed from the Spektr's solar panels. Worse, the other panels on the ship were also out of commission. The collision had knocked the station into a slow roll, tipping its huge, energy-producing wings out of alignment with the sun. Unless the ship got realigned, it couldn't produce power. And unless the ship produced power, there was no way to fire up its thrusters and change its position. Tsibliyev reported this technological Catch-22 to the ground.

"How fast are you rolling?" mission control asked. Tsibliyev looked at his dark instruments. "We don't know," he said.

Foale, however, had a handy way to figure it out. If he held up his thumb at arm's length, he could blot out a patch of sky equal to about 1 1/2[degrees] of arc--a point of reference he could use, along with his watch, to determine how fast a spacecraft was moving. Foale swam over to the window, spent a few minutes watching stars come and go behind his thumb, and swam back to Tsibliyev and Lazutkin. "Tell them we're moving one degree per second," he said.

For the ground, this was good news. One degree was a small enough drift for mission control to correct remotely. Bypassing Mir's unconscious computer system, the controllers sent up a command instructing the station's engines to light. An instant later they did, and the groaning old spaceliner came slowly to a stop.

JUNE 25, EARLY EVENING To Foale, there was nothing more perversely beautiful than a dead spacecraft. It had been two orbits since mission control had stabilized Mir, but while controllers had been able to stop the station's rotation, they hadn't been able to point it toward anything useful. With the solar panels still in shadow, the cabin lights and instrument panels went dead, and the fans and pumps that gave the spacecraft the atmosphere of a low-decibel boiler room fell silent. Huddling together in the main module, Tsibliyev, Lazutkin and Foale spent a few serene hours watching Earth roll silently by. All that disturbed their reverie was the periodic waving of flight plans about in order to fan away their exhaled carbon dioxide, which the ship's ventilators could no longer remove.

But this kind of peace was not unlike the rapture that seizes the snowbound before they freeze to death. If the Mir crew members were going to save their station and perhaps themselves, they would have to get moving fast. Though the thrusters on Mir were powerless to make the sweeping maneuver necessary to orient the solar panels, the thrusters on the Soyuz might not be. Like a pickup truck pushing a tractor trailer, the little lifeboat just might be able to nudge the mammoth Mir far enough for its panels to catch a shaft of sunlight.

With ground control's approval, Tsibliyev climbed into the Soyuz, while Foale and Lazutkin looked for stars to help them establish their bearings.

"Try moving along the y-axis to the upper left," Foale yelled to Tsibliyev.

"How long?" the commander asked.

"Try five pulses."

Tsibliyev complied, and Foale checked the windows again. The stars had not moved. "Try another five," he suggested.

For two orbits or so, the crew kept up this orbital hit-or-miss, searching doggedly for the sun. Finally, at well after midnight on the morning of June 26, an instrument panel flickered to life, then a cabin light. Behind the walls, a fan started to whir, and a pump started to pump. One system at a time, instrument by instrument, the battered Mir recovered. By 2 a.m., more than 14 hours after it had sustained an injury that should have claimed its life, the world's only operating space station was working again.

THURSDAY, AUG. 21 Strictly speaking, Foale did not have to help Tsibliyev and Lazutkin into the Soyuz lifeboat. The cosmonauts, after all, had been certified to fly the Soyuz line of ships long before Foale had even got his first close look at one. What's more, even if they had needed assistance, there were other people aboard the station today to handle the job. Earlier in the week, cosmonauts Anatoli Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov had arrived in a Soyuz of their own to relieve the two Russians. Foale would be going home too, but his ride aboard a U.S. shuttle wouldn't arrive until October.

Foale had not been looking forward to the day Tsibliyev and Lazutkin would leave; surprisingly, Tsibliyev had also anticipated it with some dread. Frequently over the past six weeks, the dinner conversation had turned to speculation over the criticism he might face when he returned to Earth. Foale, the Westerner, was convinced he would face none. Tsibliyev, the Easterner, familiar with Russia's long history of finger-pointing and blame laying, was not so sure. "Michael, you don't know what our system is like," he would say.

"I know what your system was like," Foale answered. "I think it's changing."

Tsibliyev rarely seemed reassured. But on the morning of Aug. 21, as Foale lingered by the Soyuz, offering his soon to be former crewmates his not entirely necessary help, Tsibliyev seemed relieved to be going. The Russians strapped themselves in and flashed Foale a smile, and the three men began to work the hatch closed. Just before it sealed completely, Foale felt his eyes well up and looked away. When he looked back, he forced another grin. Lazutkin extended him the pilot's courtesy of pretending he didn't notice the tears. Moments later, the hatch was sealed, and Foale went to the window and watched as the Soyuz shrank to a distant dot and then vanished into the atmosphere. Within the hour, the Russians were on the ground, and Foale, more than 200 miles above them, returned quietly to his work.

--With reporting by Andrew Meier/Moscow and Dick Thompson/Washington

Jeffrey Kluger is the co-author with Jim Lovell of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, on which the movie was based For more of Foale's harrowing experiences aboard Mir, visit time.com on the Web

With reporting by ANDREW MEIER/MOSCOW AND DICK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON