Free The As It Happens Files by Mary Lou Finlay Page A

a mattress. But there was no mattress and there was no horizontal and you could go to sleep in any position. In fact, said Dr. Payette, she came to appreciate that sleeping in space was one of the great aspects of weightlessness.
    Payette also said she would never get over the sight of the planet Earth from space. She would look up from her work and think,
Oops, there goes Australia.… Oops, there goes a small island in the Pacific.
The immensity of the desert in northern Africa, the greenness of Canada, the way the sun rises instantaneously—they had 16 sunrises and sunsets a day—were things she thought were etched on her soul for all time.
    Nowhere were the stamina, ingenuity and courage of space sailors more tested than aboard the Russian space station
Mir
in the months between February and June 1997, when a fire and then a collision with a docking cargo ship put the Russian and American crew members in great peril.
As It Happens
covered the accidents when they occurred, but it wasn’t until journalist Bryan Burrough took us behind the scenes in his book
Dragonfly
that we really understood what had been going on at the time—and we, of course, invited Burrough to paint a picture for our listeners.
    Burrough told us about the strains that existed between the Russians and Americans, in space and on the ground. The strains were caused, in part, by personality clashes among them and, in part, by cultural differences. As Burroughdescribed it, NASA chiefs were intent at that time on getting more bang for their bucks—a kind of
higher, faster, cheaper
policy—but even so, the Americans went to great lengths to make space travel as safe as possible. The Russians, on the other hand, were used to stuff breaking and making do, and they seemed to think that some of their fellow travellers were sissies. Burrough had got access to transcripts of all the Russian radio traffic during this time, and he did a brilliant job of recreating the tension and danger aboard
Mir
during the crisis.
    A poignant aspect of the
Mir
story was the fact that, although the space station was launched and assembled by the Soviet Union when it looked like a superpower, it was a bankrupt and demoralized Russia that was trying to keep the space programme going. The cosmonauts, as the Russians call their space pilots, held all the records for endurance in space, but by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, they were already being pushed to their limit, operating on a shoestring. Indeed, there was a lone cosmonaut aboard
Mir
when the U.S.S.R. came to an end, and for a time it looked as though he might be forgotten up there.
    In 1999 I went to Russia with
As It Happens
producer Thom Rose to report on how people were coping with a faltering economy and all the other challenges of adjusting to life after
glasnost.
The trip was memorable in several respects, but going out to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City to meet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was both memorable and thrilling for me. Apart from his charm and good looks, Colonel Krikalev, it turned out, was the very man who had been stranded aboard
Mir
in 1991. The mission lasted more than 311 days as a result. When Krikalev finally stepped out of his Soyuz capsule back on
terra firma,
he was wearing the badges of a country that had ceased to exist.
    When I met him, I asked Krikalev how he had kept from going crazy, alone in space for months at a time. He said it wasn’t as hard as you might think. There was the view, for one thing—always spectacular. And he’d had lots of communication with the ground—with Russian space officials, of course, but also with ham radio operators who would call him up to chat.
    Krikalev had a practical view of the problems the space programme was facing at a time of widespread economic hardship. As I reported back to Barbara Budd and Jennifer Westaway in the
As It Happens
studio in Toronto, the budget for the space programme that year was $290 million, a