Woke up around 2 AM and tossed until morning. Such dreams — home, Lyusya, Vitalik, mother — and I craved meat so badly my stomach ached. Got up at 8 AM and dove into work. We had to finish mothballing the station, recommission the transport ship, and resolve many documentation issues. This would be the first-ever “Soyuz-T” redocking, testing new fully automatic control algorithms.

We undocked. Softly, smoothly pulling away from the station, monitoring via TV and the VSK-3 optical sight. Then “Igla” activated, and we saw the station begin to turn in yaw to present its other docking port, and then the approach began. Slowly, rocking in roll, we closed and docked — contact speed 0.34 m/s.

The procedure went remarkably cleanly, and our role came down to monitoring and reporting. This is precisely the case when the human’s task with automation is to understand it and not interfere.

Here it’s worth telling about the new “Soyuz-T.” When I began studying it, I had mixed feelings. Working in the ship was easy at first; learning it was complex. Powerful digital computing, entirely new control principles. Retraining from analog to discrete principles was tough. And training in the ship was even uninteresting — the machine does everything for you.

On the older Soyuz ships, I had to activate everything myself. I issued commands, set intervals, adjusted parameters. For rendezvous and docking alone there were fifty-three contingency situations. It was complex but interesting — a duel between man and machine.

But as I went deeper into the new ship, I rose to a different level. Now I’m ahead of the machine, foreseeing what it should do. For sport, during one training I performed a “blind” docking — not seeing the station, working only from a glowing dot and parameters on the display. My trainer-ship docked with a dot. So in working with computing machines there are two approaches: formal, or beautiful, with passion.

After docking, as usual, we checked the docking seal. The ground asked us to enter the station during the comm session for TV. We were too hungry and cold, so we entered early, ate and warmed up, then went back to simulate entry on camera. Now, with our experience, we completed station recommissioning in just 30 minutes instead of the allotted several hours. The successful redocking opened the way for full program completion.

When I re-entered the station I saw dear Vitalka — his portrait hanging above the bed, as if he’d been waiting for me.