Didn’t sleep all night. Was waiting for 4 AM, when we’d be passing over Transbaikalia, where it should already be light. Around 2, I got up to check the time so I wouldn’t oversleep. After that I never lay down again. The thing is, as I mentioned, we don’t always fly over the Soviet Union during daylight. This is because our orbit precesses — that is, its plane constantly rotates because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere but is flattened at the poles, and our orbit is inclined to the equatorial plane. Therefore the gravitational force acting on the station isn’t aimed precisely toward the Earth’s center at each moment. You can picture this with the example of a child’s spinning top: when you push it from the side, the plane of its rotation, tilting, begins to change its position, that is, to precess, making a rotation around the former axis perpendicular to the floor. Similarly, our orbit changes its position in space — its plane shifts westward by 5 degrees every day. So there comes a time when we fly over the Soviet Union only at night and there’s no opportunity to work over our territory. In the morning, when we get up, we’re already flying over Western Europe down along the Red Sea, leaving our country to the left in the pre-dawn haze. And during the day we pass along America or over the ocean and only toward evening do we start passing over the Far East, entering the visibility zone of its ground stations. That’s the only place we meet the dawn of the Motherland, although by that time we’re already going to sleep together with Moscow, since on board we live on Moscow time. This is necessary to maintain consistency in our daily schedule and that of the ground control services. In such cases, communication with TsUP is provided by the ships of the floating measurement fleet: “Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin” — the flagship of the USSR Academy of Sciences fleet, “Academician Sergei Korolev,” “Cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov,” and others, stationed in the Atlantic off the coasts of North and South America and the western shores of Africa. They receive ballistic data and telemetry about the station’s systems from on board and relay them via the “Molniya” satellite to TsUP, simultaneously organizing telephone communication with it. In addition, the ships independently process incoming data and, when necessary, send commands and recommendations to the crew.

I’ll add here that as a result of the orbital plane turning 5 degrees per day plus a degree from the Earth’s annual motion, the position of the orbital plane relative to the Sun changes, leading to changes in the ratio of sunlight to shadow in each orbit. And there are times when the orbital plane occupies such a position that it becomes solar — that is, we have no shadow, the Sun doesn’t set but only skims the horizon. In this case we fly near the terminator — the line separating the lit part of the Earth on one side, where the Sun is, from shadow on the other. The cyclicality of lighting conditions, determined by the precession of our orbit, is about two months; during this time its plane, relative to the Sun, makes a full rotation around the Earth’s axis.

An interesting moment. Yesterday I sent my wife and sister during the comm session the longest kiss — spanning about 15 thousand kilometers. The session was around 8 PM, and we were being received by Ussuriysk, then we passed over Japan, Kamchatka, and went off toward America.

Past Kamchatka, we were saying goodbye. I said “I kiss you both” to them, and that kiss flew, like in a fairy tale, across seas and oceans and the entire country.

All day we’re loading the cargo ship. We packed it pretty well; we treat it with love, it really helped us out, made life easier. It was with us for almost a month and served as a good, convenient storeroom, and now we’re sending it off fully stuffed with spent regenerators (14 of them), absorbers, urine containers, solid waste collectors, and various containers with packaging refuse. It accumulates here too — bags of food waste, old clothing, etc. Stuffed it completely.

On orbit 1755 I saw Rio de Janeiro. Beautiful coastline, many bays, and Rio itself is a well-sheltered bay, but with very dirty water that in the Sun’s glare gleams like carbon paper — so dark compared to the coastal strip, where there’s a rich palette of colors from algae, plankton, and suspended matter. The coast is very beautiful, many bays, spits, a river empties into it, many shades of water.

We’re passing now over the northern part of the Cordillera; the impression from this panorama is hard to convey: it’s as if you’ve been transported millions of years back. Red-brown-maroon land — you can’t even call it land, these are solid masses of solidified lava. The domes of old volcanoes from up here look like mud geysers of various sizes. The impression is that the Earth is red-hot and molten matter is bubbling, and the bubbles of heated rock have frozen for an instant. The domes of young volcanoes look like mounds with traces of flowing streams. Their bases are light yellow, sandy colored, and in the craters there are sky-blue saucers of small lakes. A mass of different shades of rock. And to the south lies Patagonia. These are silvery-white mountain ridges stretching for hundreds of kilometers along the southwestern coast of South America. Looking at Mexico City now. The city sits on a plateau, and above it there’s a great gray dome of smog, like a fish bladder — you can see this dome of pollution very clearly against the clean, transparent atmosphere all around.

Observing the Galapagos Islands in the Atlantic today, I clearly saw that these are old volcanoes with small lakes in their craters, but the most spectacular such volcanoes are near the milky-white salt lake Poopo in Bolivia. In the center of a snow-covered brown volcano is a small lake of emerald water. This is an amazing creation of nature in its beauty and depth of color. I called it the eye of the Earth.

Before bed, in the last comm session, flying over the Moscow area, we heard a goodnight wish in the voice of Levitan, and 10 minutes later, approaching the Far East, we heard his voice again: “Good morning, ‘Elbruses,’ and once more, goodnight.”

We hear laughter in TsUP — indeed it’s funny: we go to bed with nighttime Moscow while simultaneously greeting dawn over the Far East. All sorts of things happen in flight. When relationships reach the point of silence, you choose yourself as your interlocutor. You argue, reason, regret, pity, praise yourself. This world of silence is interesting.

Only through consciousness and work do you find peace and strength. I’ve started to notice that I talk to myself out loud. It’s hard in the station’s silence without communication; everything weighs on you, there’s an inner need to talk, to reflect.