Second day of EVA preparation. In the morning you wake up on the station as if at dawn, as though you’d spent a summer night outdoors. The station is cool, and you don’t want to climb out of the sleeping bag; you lie there in a drowse, savoring your thoughts, but the comm session is coming — time to get up.

From the morning, EVA prep. Good housekeeping pays off: everything was assembled in advance; we know where everything is, recorded in the inventory book, so preparation goes fairly calmly. Few questions. Today we measured the pressure in the oxygen bottles, checked the twenty-meter tethers that will link us electrically to the station during the EVA and serve as safety lines. The ground said there’d be no traverse along the station, only work on the platform by the hatch. A pity — we should be accumulating precious experience working in open space, but our program doesn’t require leaving the exit hatch area. Of course we’d like to see, study, and understand the dynamics of free movement in space for ourselves. Especially since the spacesuit has proven itself well and allows reliable, free movement along the station, which is equipped with restraints along its entire surface. But there’s nothing to be done: discipline is discipline.

During the day we prepared the movie camera to film, in open space, the exterior of the station and ship — to check the condition of the thermal shielding, solar panels with mounting points for additional sections, antennas, and equipment — as well as our work with the scientific equipment during the EVA. I checked the movie camera battery one more time. I ran it through a full discharge by running the camera continuously. It holds 4 hours. I’m nervous — this is a unique experiment ahead, and I want to expand its scope to get as much useful and new information as possible. In the evening I worked with a micrometer, measuring the gap between the beam and crosspiece in the loading devices of the “Resurs” instrument, where 16 samples of different alloys are mounted. What don’t you end up doing in space — even quality control.