_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [117]
Warm air doesn’t rise in a weightless environment. Fire cannot spread as it does on Earth. But this one had a built-in oxygen supply. The blowtorch-like flame rendered the Mir’s water-based extinguishers useless, and the flames blocked access to one of the two Soyuz emergency escape vehicles. This meant only three of the six people on the station could leave.
Unable to put out the fire, the cosmonauts and astronauts had only one choice: They had to let the fire burn out. Station commander Valeri Korzun aimed his extinguisher at the far wall to keep it from melting. The extinguisher acted like a rocket thruster, and Linenger had to hold the cosmonaut steady. Others brought in new extinguishers when the old ones ran out. The rest of the crew shut down equipment and powered up the accessible Soyuz. Fourteen minutes later, the canister had no fuel left to burn. The fire disappeared as quickly as it had ignited.
A second emergency happened on June 25, 1997, during astronaut Mike Foale’s stay. A manual docking system could have cost him and his crewmates their lives. A Russian Progress supply ship ran into the station, knocking a hole in the Mir’s Spektr module. The result was rapid depressurization, and the crew closed the hatch to Spektr. The station’s air pressure stabilized, and after a few flight adjustments, Mir was back in operation.
My colleague covering spaceflight in those days was Robert Hager. Called the “rabbit” by those of us who admired him, Hager would hop from one story to another, and just to fire up our competitive juices, he covered them all superbly.
Robert Hager is a decent, warm, and most likable fellow, and he convinced Tim Russert, another decent, warm, and most likable fellow who is NBC’s Washington bureau chief, that we needed a detailed model of Mir. We needed it if we were to continue covering fires and wrecks and such on the Russian space station. But the main reason was Hager’s belief in models. He used them on most of his stories, including on his wedding night. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, and he told Tim Russert it shouldn’t cost more than a couple of hundred dollars.
Russert, being the supportive manager he is, said, “Fine. Do it,” and Hager was off to model factories seeking the best at the craft.
To cut to the chase, he had this detailed Mir model built at a cost of thousands of dollars. Mir never suffered another accident, and we never got to use the model. I’m told Russert moved it to the center of the bureau to use as a coat rack. Hager retired quietly to a farm in Vermont, where the senior country squire dresses smartly Saturdays and drives his tractor to the better square dances. His wife, Honoré, standing on the back between the two large tires, seems just a bit unseemly.
Back on Earth, trips into space were running like a well-oiled clock, and another senior was getting restless. John Glenn, the first American to orbit our planet, decided he’d had enough of Washington politics, and he retired from the United States Senate with the hope of returning to the pursuits of his youth. John had a hankering to prove a seventy-seven-year-old senior could handle modern spaceflight.
Most agreed it would be difficult for the average septuagenarian. Disregarding any ills, the slow movement of bodily joints, and the reduced strength of bodily functions alone would be enough to keep the average senior citizen out of orbit. But John Glenn was anything but average, and NASA was quick to recognize the public-relations value of welcoming back the senator.
But there was another problem. Lingering like a houseguest who refused to leave was a NASA promise. After the Challenger disaster, the agency announced that when it was ready to fly citizens again, the first person would be teacher, Barbara Morgan, who had been Christa McAuliffe’s backup. But a fast-thinking NASA moved quickly to nullify its promise. The agency decided to make Morgan an astronaut instead. She would attend the same