Word: mir
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...