Day off. Got up at 10 o’clock. Looked at the regions of Kazakhstan, the Aral Sea, and the Syr Darya. Saw several ring structures on the right bank. Then we started tidying up the station, did an inventory — wrote everything down in our ledger. We tried to tuck as much as possible behind the panels. In the process you notice a lot of waste of space that isn’t always possible to foresee on the ground. Behind the panels there are free spots, but it’s hard to store anything because there’s no provision for removing structural elements no longer needed in orbit: pieces of the structural frame, various brackets, holders, and posts.

Besides, things are bolted down permanently — bags, strapping bands, latches — and that prevents full use of the space behind the panels. All of this is only needed during the launch phase, when all apparatus, equipment, and gear are placed and secured on the station to meet center-of-gravity and structural-strength requirements. After the crew arrives at the station, they start settling in — essentially rearranging the equipment to suit their own working, storage, and stowage needs.

That’s natural, but such work requires moving a great deal of equipment and materials and is often accompanied by cutting and sawing metal, which not only litters the station but takes a lot of effort and time. So it’s important to plan for these tasks on the ground, which would make our life and work on board much easier. Then we loaded 4 spent regenerators into the cargo ship and replaced them behind the panels with new ones — immediately felt more spacious. In short, by day’s end we’d tidied up.

Just now I was looking at the delta of the Ural River. The land here, left and right for about 60 kilometers, is literally ash-colored — a gray surface. Lake Balkhash is blue, with light-turquoise swirls resembling plankton, especially in the eastern part. From Balkhash toward Lake Sasykol and further east there’s a fault. Before Sasykol it’s faintly defined, but beyond, toward Lake Bulun-Tokhoy in Mongolia, it’s a clearly outlined fault line. It branches, with one arm running north toward Lake Zaisan. We calculated coordinates of the observed objects using mode 82 from the “Delta” system, based on measurements through the LV-1 optical sight. Through it the relief, cities, roads, and rivers are very clearly visible — almost as well as through the porthole itself — only the color contrasts are less pronounced. I made several measurements against landmarks. During a comm session they told us that the patch we discovered in the Atlantic is a zone of the subpolar hydrological front, and in this frontal zone a school of fish — maurolicus — has been found. We asked the ground: “Is it at least edible?” Ground: “Yes, it’s a commercial species.”

In the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius, black voids of space are visible as dark bands without the faint glow of bright or faint stars. Today I watched a meteorite enter the atmosphere. I see below us a star falling toward Earth, flaring brighter, then suddenly a bright white spot bounced up as if it struck something and instantly sparkled like a sparkler.

At noon Lyusya came on the line with my sister. We had a good, cheerful talk. I sit, look at them, and think about the hardships of space. Yes, if only we’d had this little “Salyut” house during our student years with Lyusya — we’d have flown for more than a year. Everything’s here — food, warmth, cozy, music, a gym, no one to bother us, interesting work, and in the portholes an endless film about Earth and the stars. Before bed, reading the newspapers, I found among them two children’s drawings. On the backs were inscriptions that thoroughly amused Tolya and me. These were proposals from the young artists. Here they are: “Place a predatory animal on the station, for example, a wolf and a sheep. How will the wolf behave: will he pounce on the sheep immediately, or after some time? If immediately, then space doesn’t affect the wolf’s or sheep’s nature (no change). The wolf must definitely be hungry.”

Tanya Alertova, drawing by Kirill Obukh, age 6.

Another idea: “You should raise a puppy in weightlessness. Under these conditions, the dogs will develop enormous ears and paws with webbing between the toes. By flapping these ears and paddling with their paws, they’ll move around the station.” Vitaly M. from Sakhalin, drawing by Diana Borisova, age 12. Dear kids, thank you for your unusual, interesting thoughts. For your warmth and attention to us cosmonauts. Tolya and I discussed at length how the wolf would behave with the sheep on the station, and we think that even a hungry wolf wouldn’t eat the ewe up here.

After all, in that case he’d be left alone. And as we know, all life’s hardships and privations are easier to bear when there are two of you — even on an empty stomach. Your second idea, kids, downright scared us. After reading it, we grabbed our ears, looked at each other, and laughed. Everything’s normal. Apparently, we concluded, ears grow in weightlessness only in dogs, because they’re always wiggling them. As for whether very large ears and similarly large paws would help a puppy move around inside the station by flapping or paddling — that’s an interesting question of what size they’d need to be.

We started preparing the scientific equipment for installation outside the station: “Resurs” — a fixture that tests samples of various alloys under tension and compression loads; “Meduza” — a set of test tubes with various biopolymers for studying their evolution at the molecular level; panels with samples of various materials — plastics, ceramics, samples with paint-and-lacquer and optical coatings used or to be used in space technology; thermomechanical pipe joints made of shape-memory metals; “Spiral” — a set of various structural materials — springs, rings, sealing rubber — for assessing the effects of space conditions on them: temperature swings, vacuum, ultraviolet radiation, radiation, micrometeorite streams. We need to know now what materials are required for future space technology. Creating space conditions on Earth is expensive and in some ways impossible, but in space you simply mount these panels with materials outside the station — and the experiment runs in a unique natural laboratory. The next crew will swap out the samples and return these to Earth.

Now in the transfer compartment it’s gotten hard to do visual observations because the spacesuits block the portholes. Sometimes you crawl in under one to look at the Earth, and it settles on top of you, and you can’t figure out how to get out. So much for weightlessness.

We had a visit today from actor Sasha Mikhailov, who plays in the film “Muzhiki.” He sang several songs with a guitar. Five more days, and the flight duration of Kovalyonok and Savinykh will be behind us. Relations with Tolya are even. Felt boots came with the cargo ship; I sleep in them. We sleep normally.