Stewart
Mir - introduction
In 1986, the Soviet Union launched the Mir Space Station, the “second generation” that followed the Salyut series of space stations. The Mir was designed for a five-year life on orbit. It remained in use for fourteen years. During the first ten years, it performed well, with few safety issues. However, during the last four years, the aging station -- operating at more than two times beyond its design lifetime -- encountered a variety of safety hazards and human factors issues. Despite these often serious problems, the Mir crews always found a way to save the station, and no crew member was seriously injured or killed. "Mir" (Мир) in Russian can mean world or peace.
Knock Knock
Leonov's comrade accidentally locked himself in a compartment. He spent several minutes banging on the locked door and shouting, only to hear Leonov finally murmur: "Who's there?" recalls Russian space agency spokesman Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko.
Booty
When the Mir crew ran out of alcohol reserves, they would often go on "treasure-seeking" expeditions for more, tearing down interior panels to find bottles hidden by previous crews, said Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on board Mir in 1993. "Sometimes we would bump into a bottle of cognac. What a joy it was," Poleshchuk said in a recent interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda.
You're in Trouble
But unlike cosmonauts — who for luck urinate on the back tire of the bus that takes them to the launch pad — the officials who command them from Mission Control near Moscow prefer to remain "serious" and "concentrated," said Viktor Blagov, Mir's deputy control chief. "No, we don't do anything like that on our control panels," Blagov added, laughing.
Tang addiction
Hoarding seems to have occurred on every polar expedition on record. Food seems to take on an importance on long-duration polar expeditions that some other form of gratification enjoys in the workaday world, like money, sex, and drugs. In any event, the prefabricated nature of foodstuffs in space has prevented crewmembers from irritating their crewmates overmuch with making too much of a mess. The worst case from the Mir-NASA missions seems to have been Dave Wolf’s misapprehension in how a container of black currant jelly should be opened, that created a bit of a mess. The typical food incident that occurs on space missions is eating something that one is not supposed to eat. Lebedev and Berezevoy on Salyut 7 ate onions that were meant for an agricultural experiment. One can perhaps look the other way when one considers that the men may have been craving “freshies” (fresh vegetables), and that the dulled palate that space flyers experience dictated they eat something spicy. Probably more than one astronaut or cosmonaut has consumed foodstuffs meant for television commercials. Jerry Linenger, expecting pretzels to be sent up to him, almost ate the pretzel bag prop that was needed for the Rold Gold commercial.
Do you copy? Over.
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov managed to chat to a truck driver on a road in South Africa as he flew hundreds of kilometers overhead in 1992. Krikalyov sneaked an amateur radio onboard Mir and used it to establish a link with the truck driver, who was heading to Kimberley. Krikalyov's efforts to explain that he was actually talking from high above, the South African refused to believe the cosmonaut. The driver rogered "See you in Kapstadt," as he signed off.
Excerpts from:
"Pranks show lighter side of Mir" - The Moscow Times
"The Mir Crew Safety Record: Implications for Space Colonization" - Marilyn Dudley-Rowley
Regan
It has been like this for too long, waiting for you to arrive. It’s June, for Godsake. We once found it amusing that people would doubt us. We are, after all, scientists. We don’t rely on faith nor simply hope for the best. We go out and find answers, or at least enough facts to inspire in us reason to prepare for a future that seems simultaneously limited and inevitable. Maybe what is inevitable is our limited future. In any case, I miss you every day. Months pass, and sometimes on the street if the sky opens – even briefly – I swear I see you in a stranger’s face. At the next block, coat and haircut disappear down a side street. Even if I run, I can’t catch up.
I went to a doctor at the free clinic, where they train residents on the road to healing others. At the intake exam, a pathetic stripe of a girl sat across from me and very near her mentor, a frowning woman severely lacking in bedside manner. They took my vitals, measuring my pulse with their damp hands and staring into my palate as I stretched out my tongue. They grunted and spoke in strange Eastern proverbs about my diet and stress level. Only then did they ask why I was there. I told them nothing at first. It’s easy to feel hesitant in front of clinicians. They weren’t the warm maternal figures I prefer in confidants, but then neither were you. You ran hot and cold, your yin out of balance with your yang.
“My friend has changed,” I offered. They motioned that I go on. “She had a nervous breakdown and has stopped speaking to me.”
“How long since the last communication?” The phrasing brought to mind one’s daily evacuation.
“Nine months.”
“Oh.”
“We share the same house, and it’s difficult.” I paused, feeling self-conscious.
“This isn’t normal, is it?”
“We’re not here to diagnose your friend. We’re here to help you.”
“I’m not the one with the problem. I’m not the one who broke down.”
The one in charge adjusted her posture, which had a puppetry effect upon her consort, who slouched, her cleavage sheltering her nametag. “But you are the one with the problem. You came to us for help. It’s too much for you to handle alone.”
“It is.” I began sobbing, then quickly recovered. The woman examined me with her speculum gaze. “It reminds me of other times when people have shut me off or run away, except my friend is still there. In the house. Where I sleep. There’s an eerie silence in the night, as if I’m going deaf.”
The hunchback was instructed to conduct a rudimentary check of my ears. In these moments of consultation, I felt myself retreat into the walls, which were empty and beige, neutrality expedient in the identification of blood accidentally emitted during a procedure. They spoke only to themselves, as if I was under anesthetic or the age of eight. They spoke about me like I was absent, like you are, even now. They smirked when jotting down whatever chicken scratch passes as medical analysis. The one in charge asked me to go on. It was important, she said, to get it all out.
I began the slow surgery of my soul. It lasted twelve minutes, uninterrupted. As I spoke, I multi-tasked on a level nearly administrative, and just as trivial. I made mental notes, amusing myself with observations about the younger one’s dress and fathoming during my diatribe on the cruelty of relationships that the two women likely (and rightly) felt as devoid of their bodies as I did while quietly inspected by their shiny metallic tools, christened in a liter of blue chemicals sitting on the sink. I also provided commentary on my words as they spilled forth: how hypocritical I sounded, how careful I was not to share all valid and valuable details, how I glossed over those which were the most shocking and wallowed in those most petty yet painful. The smallest infractions often arrest in me the most rage.
Once an appropriate gap in my oratory had commenced, the one in charge suggested, “Maybe this is your fault. Have you considered that? Maybe you provoke in those closest to you an incredible sense of fear that you will judge them, that you are judging them, that you honestly think what you say. Maybe they shut you off physically and emotionally because you do not show any restraint. Have you entertained the idea that you are a piece of work?” I may be remembering her comments differently than they were, but I mean to convey what she communicated, and so much of that is the clothing that naked language wears.
They stood and gave me an assurance that they -- unlike you -- would return. They were gone for only twenty minutes, as I watched the clock, its reflective surface showing me myself as in a fish-eye lens, but those were the twenty longest minutes of my life, longer even than those nine months with nary of word from you. I remember coming home each day and anticipating everything would be back to normal, that you would have emerged from the hole in which you had fallen. You were, at that time, doing all sorts of crazy things: covering mirrors and other reflective surfaces – the television shrouded in a blanket, doorknobs covered with masking tape – to prevent the ghosts from reaching you or your soul from escaping your body. That was the winter that lasted ten months in darkness. The news told us that there was no such thing as global warming. It was as nonsensical as the Holocaust. Our mayor had installed a giant prism on the coastline to reflect sunshine on the sea to us in the city. Everyone was depressed and on drugs for it, or so they claimed.
That time alone in that room felt so long because of the one-way mirror set into a recessed wall. It was both transparent, in that the patient knew from its existence that others might be watching, and opaque like a movie screen before the curtain opens. They had obviously never been on the other side of the dark glass, because their conversation was completely, disturbingly audible. I listened without gawking at the shadowy portal as what sounded like ten voices laughed and joked about my predicament. I was clearly the unstable one, they said, wondering aloud if this friend of whom I spoke in fact existed, and if so, the silent treatment was easy to imagine and understand. Someone argued in meager defense of my sanity, but she was shot down quickly as naïve and sympathetic. Her heart called into question her professionalism.
I left the room abruptly and charged down the hallway, bypassing a clerk. The gaggling troupe followed close behind, but I exited through an emergency-only staff door, which was unlocked and unalarmed. Their footsteps echoed down four flights in the steel-lined corridor, smelling of the brewery block which it had been prior to renovation, before it housed an acupuncturist, a modern design store, a Whole Foods, a consignment shop, and a pharmacy for the seasonally disaffected. I tried to open my car door with the mailbox key and escaped at last into the interior of my vehicle before they assaulted my windshield like a flock of low-flying, climate-deranged sea birds. Their beaks threatened my wiper blades as their enormous wings brutalized by side mirrors. I drove off without paying.
You have not been seen as long as the sun. I send signals on the beach with a Cover Girl compact and pat my face with a disposable powder puff when you do not reply. There is a store that sells affordable b.b. guns, and I have taken up skeet shooting scavengers on the shoreline. I go there after work, when we would have made dinner together and poured each other glass after glass of embarrassingly potent white table wine. We drank it in the summer – do you remember? -- or anytime when life seemed that season, bright and open with possibility, the sun rotating above us like a timid disco ball, slowly and effortlessly coming closer each day to destroy us.
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