I woke up thinking we’d overslept, since we went to bed late last night, at two in the morning. I asked Tolya what time it was; he said 6 o’clock. Strange — it felt like I’d slept a full night. We got up at 8. In the comm session we confirmed the day’s program and got to work. First came an accelerometer test on the transport ship, since the ground suspects, based on their analysis, that the accelerometers produce a systematic error of about 1 to 2 meters per 100 meters of impulse during engine firings. At the same time, they wanted to see how our moving around the station during an engine burn affects the accelerometer error. I ran the test; it went fine. Tolya was replacing a regenerator in the meantime. Then I went into the cargo ship and started securing spent station equipment inside — regenerators, scrubbers, bags of food waste, laundry, and so on. When I opened the cargo ship hatch, the compartment looked like a storeroom with empty shelves.

In weightlessness, as I’ve already said, in an enclosed volume there’s no definite concept of up or down. There’s only a conditional sense of “up” as whatever is above your head, and if you flip over, everything looks different. You take an instrument frame, for example, start putting it in what seems like the right place, but it doesn’t fit. So you start rotating head over heels, trying to recall the view of the interior from which you originally removed it. This can go on for a long time before you find the right orientation, and you may never find it, because we have no earthly habit of remembering our position. You could compare it to this: on Earth, we don’t remember what stride we use walking to work — long, medium — or how many steps we take, and if the number of steps determined whether you arrived at work or not, you’d probably never get there.

Another thing: you’re installing a container, turning it this way and that, and it won’t fit through a narrow gap in the frame structure. Or the opposite — you can’t pull it out, you’re straining, and nothing you do helps. You leave it, start on something else, and suddenly you look and it’s floated into its place all on its own. In weightlessness you sometimes have to follow the object rather than imposing your own dynamics of movement on it — you won’t guess right. During unloading, you dump lots of fasteners into one bag, and when you start loading, you can’t find the bolt or nut you need. Even though the bag is transparent and you can see it, the moment you open it to grab it, everything flies out. In short, work in weightlessness demands strict order and recording of every action. I decided to repair “Oasis” — it’s leaking water. Even though it’s a lot of trouble, it needs to be done: this is our field, after all. I water the plants regularly, with pleasure, I pamper them and don’t spare the water. The peas and oats have now fully sprouted.

Near Cuba I saw a very beautiful area with vivid turquoise streaks of current, and off the south coast of Africa I observed an exotic sight, like something from a fairy tale — hilly land thickly covered in vegetation, and through the hills in the jungle, a golden road. Later I realized it wasn’t a road but a river — wide, winding, its ribbon with numerous sandy shoals stretching to the ocean. In another spot I saw an inexplicable dark patch hovering above the water near the ocean shore, casting a shadow on the surface. It wasn’t a cloud; the clouds were higher. I stood gaping and forgot to photograph it — which happens often, by the way. You see something, you want to understand what it is, and by the time you realize you need to take the shot, it’s too late. It was probably a cloud in the shadow of other clouds. It’s midnight now; time to sleep. I’ll go have one more look at the Earth. Today our backup crew came on the comm link.

Newsreel footage capturing the preparation for the flight, the launch of the spacecraft, and the life and work of the cosmonauts aboard Salyut-7.