I got up and realized there’s none of the former buoyancy of mood — somehow even melancholy. And that’s only natural: routine has set in. Something is wrong with the water regeneration system. Preparing breakfast has become difficult; the water comes out with air, the food packets swell up like fish bladders, and the freeze-dried food reconstitutes poorly. We need to wait until the drinking water container runs dry, then refill it with good water without bubbles. Today during the day Tolya said to me: “How long can I keep chasing after your things, Valentin?” My things being the sextant, the camera, the movie camera. I said: “Tolya, if after a week of flight we start keeping count of what’s mine and what’s yours, that won’t lead anywhere good.” I could see he was offended. During breakfast we agreed to set up a rotation for meal preparation. Today we ran the solar orientation test (SOR) and the gravitational orientation test. The ground is pleased, though I’m not entirely happy with everything.

In the evening we summed up our week’s work. The head of Group 19-1 said he had worked with all the main expeditions, but that so much had been accomplished in so little time — that had never happened before. According to the doctors, as of today we’re running a sleep deficit of 7 hours and have overworked by 20 hours; we need to make it up somewhere. I noticed Tolya’s mood lifting after that assessment. And now, to sleep. The day after tomorrow there’s a TV meeting with our families. That’s a holiday. What’s also hard is that we have no music. Whenever we can, we ask our tracking ships “Akademik Sergei Korolyov” and “Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov” to play us songs when we pass over them. They’ll send a tape recorder with the first cargo ship. While floating past today, I torpedoed the airlock with my head — clipped it, cut my forehead. My head rang for about two hours, but it passed.

Woke up, opened my eyes — Tolya is hovering right above me, muttering something in his sleep. Then he opened his eyes, looked at me, and said: “I was dreaming about something.” I got up, floated to the primary post, checked the time. It was only half past six in the morning, so we went back to sleep. Woke up at half past eight. Quickly did our morning routine; I started making breakfast. Today is a so-called day of active rest. We ran the systems check, did our exercise, and started preparing for a TV report. Set up the lights, thought about what to talk about, and decided to discuss the differences between Salyut-7 and Salyut-6.

In the report, we said that our Salyut-7 station outwardly looks almost no different from its predecessor, Salyut-6: the same dimensions, the same volumes, the same structural elements. But this is only superficial resemblance.

In reality, the enormous experience accumulated during five years of operating Salyut-6, by multiple long-duration expedition crews and visiting expedition crews — amounting to around a thousand of their suggestions and observations on improving systems, components, and equipment — found its reflection in the new station.

The interior has now been almost completely updated: the equipment layout is more convenient for work, maintenance, and repair; a new “Rodnik” system has been installed — essentially, plumbing has appeared on board; the food system has changed — now we compose our own menu and select products from a pantry as we wish; more advanced medical equipment, “Aelita,” has been installed; the portholes now have protective covers against contamination from fuel components of working engines and micrometeorites; to improve rendezvous and docking reliability, an additional radio system, “Mera,” has been introduced; the solar arrays have mounting points for attaching supplementary solar panels to boost on-board power generation — and this list could go on further. At the same time, the scientific instrument suite has been renewed almost entirely. Working up here now, in space, on Salyut-7 — having been through the full training program for Salyut-6 — I truly feel the expanded capabilities of the new station, whether it concerns our life here or our work.

After lunch, we started visual observations. Frankly, things are going poorly — we often can’t tell where we’re flying. The difficulty is that we’re mostly in gravitational stabilization, meaning the station’s longitudinal axis is pointed toward the Earth’s center — in other words, relative to the Earth the station stands on end. In this orientation, not all portholes are usable for observations. Just now we flew over a salt lake in northern Canada, and next to it a very distinctive ring geological structure about 60 kilometers in diameter, rimmed with a white crust of salt. Unfortunately, I couldn’t photograph it in time. Some regions of the Earth are hard to recognize; we need to learn Earth’s geography anew, from space.

While filling a water container, I watched with interest the behavior of air bubbles in the water. Some float independently; others touch each other but don’t merge — the water doesn’t squeeze them out. Inside the container, large bubbles drift like jellyfish, along with a scattering of tiny air spheres. I filmed their behavior with the movie camera, got carried away, and used up an entire cassette. We just spoke with the ground; they said our families are getting ready for tomorrow’s meeting. Tolya said something good in today’s report: that because the preparation was so grueling, the flight itself is not hard to bear — whereas if someone had breezed through training, it would be tough for them up here.