On February 23, 1997, a fire broke out at the Russian Mir station, which began with the ignition of an atmospheric regeneration oxygen bomb. At the station at that moment there were six people from two international crews, two Soyuz TM ships were docked, which, in principle, made it possible to evacuate all people, however, one of the Soyuz was behind the fire and was heavily smoked. The crew was forced to put on gas masks and proceed to rescue the station. The fire was extinguished before the situation got completely out of control, but for some time after the incident, everyone had to wear respirators. 25 years ago, a fire broke out at the Mir station, threatening the lives of six people who were in space at that time - four Russian cosmonauts, one German and one American astronaut. The fire was extinguished, but it became a prologue to a whole series of emergencies that eventually forced us to say goodbye to the Russian space station, de-orbit it in the spring of 2001, and start building the ISS international station. Nevertheless, the heroic actions of the Russian crew and especially the commanders of the two expeditions - Valery Korzun and Vasily Tsibliyev - allowed Mir to work for another four years. Details of what was happening then on board the station became known in 2006, when Channel One filmed a documentary about the 23rd international expedition called “Nowhere to Run. Fire at the space station.
On February 23, 1997, Mir, as well as throughout Russia, celebrated Defender of the Fatherland Day, however, as stated, the celebration in space was exclusively non-alcoholic and subsequent events had nothing to do with this festive relaxation. The change of shifts continued on board the station - the crew of the 22nd expedition, consisting of Valery Korzun, Alexander Kaleri (they had been flying on the Mir for six months already) and the American Jerry Michael Linenger, who only arrived in January on the Atlantis shuttle and then worked until the end of May - was replaced by the 23rd expedition: Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin, who arrived two weeks before. German astronaut Reinhold Ewald also visited the Russian station with them on a short visit. The incident itself flared up - literally - before dinner, when the astronauts said goodbye to ground services and wished them good night.
Alexander Lazutkin inserted another unit into the pipe of the oxygen bombs combustion plant, started the process, but when he turned away, he heard some uncharacteristic sounds, and immediately after that, the fabric on the bag with the filter put on the mouth of the "gun" began to smolder.
After a short stupor, the cosmonaut realized that an unforeseen situation had arisen, but the first to voice all this, according to Vasily Tsibliyev, was the German Reinhold Ewald, who said: “We are on fire, men!”
The need to use oxygen bombs arose from the crew due to the fact that there were six people on board the Mir at once. The regular composition of the atmosphere at the station was maintained with the help of a special installation that extracted oxygen from the water and vented the unnecessary hydrogen produced at the same time, but all this was only enough for a crew of three, and when the number of people at the station was exceeded, they began to burn oxygen bombs - according to checker per person.
After a short delay, the cosmonauts began to fill the fire extinguishers, but it was not so easy. Fire extinguishers worked in two modes - foam and liquid. The foam was immediately thrown off by a powerful jet of oxygen coming out of the installation, and the liquid that fell on the hot metal gave a large amount of steam and smoke. A continuous gray veil shrouded everything before the eyes of the astronauts, and nothing could be seen even at a distance of a meter. They tore new fire extinguishers from panels in other compartments of the station and passed them along the chain.
“I return with a fire extinguisher and observe the following picture: a solid gray shroud, and against the background of this gray shroud Valera extinguishes with a fire extinguisher, hangs in the air; he was already wearing only shorts, and from there a bright crimson flame, ”Alexander Lazutkin later recalled. Valery Korzun, who extinguished the fire, also suffered from his negligence: “During extinguishing, I touched the generator with my finger and received a burn, small, smaller than a penny coin, such a first-degree burn, a blister, it was not so critical.”The danger, among other things, also consisted in the fact that the flame, fueled by oxygen, beat right into the wall of the station, consisting of very thin and low-melting aluminum only one and a half millimeters thick. In a matter of minutes, such a fire could not withstand the wall, burn out and melt, and depressurization of the station threatened with a sharp drop in pressure, from which blood would boil in the veins. It was not possible to calculate in advance how many seconds the air would go into the resulting hole, the instructions were silent on this matter, besides, hundreds of cables were laid along the walls of the station, and Korzun and Tsibliyev were already beginning to notice that the insulation on them had melted and burned. It also threatened with inevitable short circuits: some aluminum parts of the panels that surrounded the ill-fated oxygen generator had already melted.
We should have thought about evacuating the station. At that time, two Soyuz TMs were docked to the Mir at the opposite ends of the station, each of them had three seats, so that the entire six that were at the station could, in principle, be saved. However, one of the Soyuz was docked just behind the fire and managed to fill with poisonous smoke.
“I fly into the ship, open the hatch and see that the ship is in smoke, and, probably, I got scared a second time, I realized that, in principle, we can die because we have nowhere to go to the smoke,” said Lazutkin. - I really wanted to open the window ... Normal human reaction! And so, when you felt that you couldn’t open the window, the whole world around you immediately shrunk to the size of a small station.”
The astronauts tried to use flashlights, but still they couldn’t see anything in the smoke at arm’s length — everything was covered in carbon monoxide, there was nothing to breathe. Tsibliyev gave the order to urgently put on special gas masks, which themselves produced oxygen for breathing, but their work was only enough for two hours, during which some final solution had to be found.
The one who panicked the most was Jerry Linenger, a US Navy medical officer, who demanded an immediate evacuation. Korzun sent him to the far end of the station and instructed him to prepare an intensive care post, picking up the appropriate medicines that can help with carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide poisoning. This was done, according to Korzun, rather in order to simply distract the American.
On Earth, meanwhile, they did not immediately learn about the fire, since normal communication with the station was possible only when the Mir was over the territory of Russia - then radio sessions were organized with the MCC, which lasted 10-20 minutes. The station made one revolution around the Earth in an hour and a half, and the fire broke out just during radio silence and flight over the Pacific Ocean. The NASA agency allowed the use of its communication points located on the territory of the United States, but this system was still poorly debugged and often gave only one-way communication - the astronauts could only transmit something to Earth in this way. Nevertheless, the message about the fire was accepted, and all possible specialists were already called to the MCC, who began to work out recommendations for rescue.
When the oxygen in the gas masks was already running out, the smoke had not yet had time to dissipate, and Korzun and Tsibliyev were still forced to make a decision to switch to breathing through respirators, which were then not removed for a long time - even during sleep.
“Isolation ... Well, you understand how it smells, this smell haunted us for many years after it was all over,” admitted Vasily Tsibliyev.
The smoke at the Mir station dissipated by the morning of February 24, it became more or less safe to breathe there, and the Russian MCC came to the conclusion that the operation of the station could still be continued. On March 2, Korzun, Kaleri, and Ewald were scheduled to return to Earth, while Tsibliyev, Lazutkin, and the American Linenger remained on Mir. However, soon after this, a series of new breakdowns and lengthy work to eliminate them began at the station.
First, the Elektron oxygen production unit broke down, which decomposed water into oxygen and hydrogen and ensured the renewal of the atmosphere at the station in the normal mode. The astronauts turned on the backup system, but it also failed the next day. In the end, I had to burn those very oxygen bombs, from one of which the described fire began. Experts on Earth concluded that then arose nevertheless due to a single defect in the device, and the checkers as a whole are not dangerous, however, when connecting the next checker, it was recommended to keep a fire extinguisher at the ready.Then the Russian cosmonauts and the American astronaut began to be very worried about the rising temperature at the station, which eventually reached +48°C in some compartments. I had to strip down to my shorts like in a steam room. At the same time, the high degree of humidity led to the fact that the condensate that fell out flooded the boxes with the equipment, threatening short circuits. The toilet was not working properly. There was a problem with the leakage of a poisonous, colorless, odorless coolant - ethylene glycol circulating through thin tubes under the skin of all Mir modules. Tsibliyev and Lazutkin, abandoning all the planned experiments, searched for all these leaks for a long time, eventually found and fixed them. Until that time, the recommendations of the TsUPa sounded like this: “We breathe less often, we don’t do physical education at all.” NASA at that time demanded that Russia either immediately solve all technical problems on Mir, or curtail all programs and return its astronaut to Earth. And until that moment, Linenger, ignoring the efforts of the Russian cosmonauts, was obliged to conduct the planned experiments, which greatly offended the Russians, who felt like some kind of plumbers with a hotel guest.
When all the problems seemed to have been eliminated, and the cargo ship Progress M34, which arrived at Mir on April 6, delivered the necessary additional equipment, NASA nevertheless decided to continue joint expeditions with the Russians and sent the same shuttle Atlantis, which docked at the station on May 17. The Atlantis crew consisted of seven people and stayed in space for 9 days. They were commanded by Charles Precourt, and besides him, the pilot Eileen Collins, Carlos Noriega, Edward Lu, the Frenchman Jean-Francois Clervois, the Russian woman Elena Kondakova and Michael Colin Foul, who finally replaced Linenger as part of a permanent expedition with Tsibliyev and Lazutkin, were on board. They speak much better about the new American in their memories than about the previous one, who panicked during the fire and did not provide any help with the repair work. Michael Foul, despite forbidding instructions, still helped the Russians in everything.
Nevertheless, it was precisely with this composition of the 23rd expedition of the Mir station that decisive damage was inflicted, from which it has not recovered. This happened during a rather dubious, according to some experts, experiment - manual docking - that is, docking in camera mode with the Progress M34 cargo ship on June 25, 1997. At the same time, the station itself was also outside the radio visibility zone with the MCC. This "experiment" was designed to save money spent on the operation of an extremely expensive automatic docking module manufactured by Ukraine - worth about $ 2 million. The crew commander Vasily Tsibliyev, who controlled the manipulator, for some reason, could not cope with this task, and the 6-ton ship crashed into the Spektr module at a speed of 10 km/h. At the same time, the solar panels were crushed and the station building was depressurized. Inside, the pressure dropped sharply, it became even impossible to talk, the astronauts were preparing for evacuation, but in the last minutes they still managed to undock the thick electrical cables stretched into the Spektr, batten down the hatch into this compartment and thereby save the station for another year. This was the largest accident on Mir in its entire 11-year history, not even comparable to a fire.
In informal conversations, representatives of the MCC (and even President Boris Yeltsin himself publicly) blamed the "human factor" for everything - that is, the cosmonauts themselves. However, Tsibliyev refused to be a “switchman” and himself actually accused the MCC of incompetence, throwing at some point even the following phrase: “Many on Earth clearly wanted us to return dead,” which Kommersant wrote at the time. Tsibliyev was going to be heavily fined, but as a result, all members of the crew of the 23rd expedition were nevertheless presented with state awards: Lazutkin received the title of Hero of Russia, and Tsibliyev received the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III degree. Tsibliyev became a Hero of the Russian Federation on January 14, 1994 for his previous flight into space.
August 7, 1997, another expedition flew to Mir, consisting of Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov, and on August 14, Tsibliyev and Lazutkin, returning to Earth on the Soyuz, faced their final accident when their soft landing, - the meeting with the planet turned out to be very rough, it was comparable to overloads in a car accident.
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