Atlantis lifts off at night, headed for a wounded Russian station
Three months earlier, a runaway cargo ship had punched a hole in Mir's Spektr module, and NASA needed to know its astronauts could still safely live aboard the station. On September 25, 1997, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:34 p.m., commanded by James Wetherbee with pilot Michael Bloomfield and five mission specialists. The crew carried David Wolf, who was set to relieve Michael Foale after his 145 days in orbit, along with tons of supplies and repair gear. It was the seventh Shuttle-Mir docking of the joint American-Russian program.
STS-86 tested whether NASA would keep flying astronauts to a station that had nearly depressurized months earlier. Wolf's rotation onto Mir kept an unbroken American presence there, the whole point of Phase 1B. It proved Washington and Moscow could still run a joint human spaceflight program even after a near-disaster.
QWhy was Wendy Lawrence pulled from the Mir crew swap at the last minute?
Wendy Lawrence had trained for months as Michael Foale's scheduled replacement, but NASA discovered she was too small to fit the Russian Orlan spacesuit required for the internal spacewalk needed to fix Spektr's severed power cables. On July 30, 1997, the agency announced David Wolf, her backup, would take her place on Mir instead, while Lawrence stayed aboard Atlantis for the round trip. NASA announced the swap on July 30, but Administrator Daniel Goldin reportedly did not make the final call on flying Wolf up, rather than pulling the plug on the astronaut rotation entirely, until the night before liftoff. Lawrence flew anyway, just without the station stay she had spent a year preparing for.
QWhat went wrong during the training exercise that knocked out Mir's power before the emergency repair spacewalk?
While Michael Foale was training for an internal spacewalk to reconnect Spektr's solar array cables, a power cable was accidentally disconnected during a routine exercise, cutting power to the entire station. The mishap came on the heels of commander Vasili Tsibliev being grounded from the repair walk himself after a July 13 medical exam turned up an irregular heartbeat. Between the commander's heart trouble and the accidental blackout, Mir 23's original repair plan collapsed entirely, and NASA announced on July 21 that the incoming Mir 24 crew would handle the internal spacewalk instead. The station's troubles compounded on each other for weeks before Atlantis ever left the pad.
QWhat specific hardware did the Mir 24 crew retrieve during Foale's external spacewalk to hunt for the hull breach?
During a six-hour spacewalk on September 5, Michael Foale and Anatoly Solovyev retrieved a radiation-monitoring device that cosmonaut Jerry Linenger had left mounted outside the station months earlier, and repositioned two undamaged solar arrays to catch more sunlight. The pair also scanned Spektr's exterior for the puncture point from the June Progress collision, though the survey never definitively located the breach. Foale's role during the earlier internal repair spacewalk had been different: he stayed inside a docked Soyuz capsule the whole time, relaying communications between the spacewalking cosmonauts and ground controllers rather than working the hull himself.
