Lyusya said to me yesterday: “Valek, I miss you so much.” I replied: “Well, dear, we’ll have missed each other enough to last a lifetime.” Days off. These days are nothing like on Earth — all interests are inside the station. You can’t sing all day, you can sleep, but it’s dreary, quiet, like a den. So we entertain ourselves with work again. Commentator Pyotr Pelekhov came on the comm. He says: “I want to raise one question. Before that, I asked for a reason: ‘Are you tired or not?’ I’ve been watching you closely and I see that you work on your days off — Valentin sends geological observations, Anatoly works on some experiments. I understand — it’s all good, and one could say, look at these people pushing themselves, but we’ve gone to space for a long time, so how do you learn to rest there, without geology, without experiments?” We replied that for now, work is the only thing helping us fly as long as possible, because there’s the mandatory planned work and there’s work we enjoy. And when we do what we love in our free time or on days off, we get satisfaction, our spirits lift, and that means we’re resting, recharging. So if you’ve managed to create your own world here, an atmosphere of interests that draw you in, you don’t notice the time — you live by this, drawing strength from these interests, switching to them, distracting yourself from the difficulties that come with work, life, and contact with the ground.
He asks: “Isn’t there another way? You could take books up there, they even took chess. I’m not talking about a guitar. Is all of that completely ruled out?” We have plenty of books. About twenty per person. But it’s all service documentation. True, there are fiction books too, but reading them in space is premature. There’s enough time for that on Earth. Up here, you’d better get your fill of the book outside the window. This isn’t Antarctica, where the research site is always the same — here, it’s different every time. We once tried a crossword puzzle before bed, about 20-25 minutes, and gave up — other thoughts and worries intruded, not the right time. We’ve set ourselves so many obligations that you’re on a leash, constantly serving them.
LIST OF ONBOARD DOCUMENTATION
Onboard flight program
Systems operation
Dynamics, docking, undocking
Unified propulsion system (ODU) operation
Decommissioning, recommissioning
Reference materials
Contingency procedures
Science equipment (NA) test procedures
Geophysical experiments
Technological experiments
Technical experiments
Scientific experiments
NA reference materials
Medical experiments
Medical support
Biological experiments
Film and photo operations
Television reports
Contingency procedures for science and photo equipment
Reference materials for photo equipment
Loading and unloading operations
Maintenance and repair
EVA
Extravehicular activity
Emergency station evacuation, main crew (EO)
Emergency station evacuation, visiting expedition (EP)
Joint operations
Visual observations journal, parts 1 and 2
Uplinked information
Downlinked information
Today we did manage to film the Sun’s refraction as it descended behind the atmosphere, appearing to flatten due to the bending of solar rays. The same effect can be observed on Earth at sunset over the sea or on a plain. Jagged edges appeared at the disk’s limb, and bands crossed the surface of the enormous luminary as it shone through the atmosphere. From the shape of the step-like notches, their number, the width and color of the bands, one can judge that the atmosphere is non-uniform by altitude, smoothly and continuously transitioning into space. Its density doesn’t simply decrease with altitude — there are fluctuations depending on the presence of aerosol layers and temperature variations: now a rarefied layer, now a dense one.
Repaired Oasis, which I would have given up on long ago if not for my wife, who works at the research institute behind it. Then I worked with PSN and we performed calibration of the X-ray spectrometer.
Tomorrow is a demanding day. Lots of new work, unfamiliar from our ground training. We’ve been flying a long time, new tasks appear, and cargo vehicles deliver the necessary equipment.
What I want to say is this — they often repeat the phrase to us from the ground: “Take care of each other.” Before the flight, I accepted it too, and it resonated with my convictions, but up here it sounds like a generic phrase, nice but lifeless. The more accurate thing to say here would be: “Don’t cross the line of good relations; be decent in everything, from small things to large.”
Tomorrow marks 25 years since the beginning of the space era, which started with the launch of the Soviet Earth satellite. I remember celebrating the twentieth anniversary of that date at Baikonur, when we were preparing the Salyut-6 station and its first crew — Kovalyonok and Ryumin — for flight. In the evening, after work, we gathered in the cafeteria at the pad from which the first satellite was launched and Yuri Gagarin lifted off. At the table were many of those who created the space technology, built Baikonur, were the first to blaze humanity’s new road. They told us they arrived in these parts in the summer of 1955. And work here began with the search for water. It’s hard to believe that in just 2 years, in the times of postwar devastation and many deprivations for our people, an entire city was built, a launch complex with factories, roads, and the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite was carried out. I spoke about this in a television report. And in the fact that it was precisely our Motherland, our people, that history determined would be first to rise to a new level of knowledge, there is undoubtedly a great logic. I remember well those days when crowds of people gathered in the streets in the evenings to see the satellite. The times of its passage over the country’s cities were announced on the radio. And it was visible as an ordinary star — what was striking was only that it moved, flickering against the background of fixed stars. Everyone who saw it felt like discoverers. At the time, many couldn’t imagine what a satellite was, what force launched it into space, how it flew, and what kind of speed 8 kilometers per second was. They measured it against the distance to the nearest city or Moscow, how fast you’d get there. It was science fiction that had suddenly become reality — and a reality they themselves had made possible.