Last night the station completed its three-thousandth orbit. A day of astrophysics experiments. In the morning we began preparing the equipment. We finished just in time for the start of work. We conducted observations with Piramig, then moved on to a new X-ray source using the star-orientation mode from Delta, which runs without our involvement — searching for stars by spiral or line-by-line scanning of a patch of sky with the narrow field of view of the X-ray spectrometer. This happened during a comm session, and the ground, seeing that we were free, asked us to answer questions from a Central Television commentator. By the voice it wasn’t Tikhomirov. I liked how he suddenly asked: “Which source are you working on right now?” We couldn’t answer immediately, since there were no bright stars nearby, and a catalog number doesn’t mean much. So we answered: we were measuring radiation from stellar systems, galaxies, black holes — it was running automatically, without us. Still, it was embarrassing not to know. Fortunately, by that time photographs taken by Piramig during the Soviet-French expedition had already been delivered to us, and we decided to show them. And he asks again: “What constellation is that?” The image shows thousands of stars, down to 13th magnitude. We answer that when people were naming stars and constellations, they hadn’t yet looked that far or seen that many. Our job in the photographs is precise orientation and stabilization; the rest is the instrument’s business.

That question reminded me once again that my old approach holds true here as well — you can’t do work without understanding what it’s for, with a poor picture of what you’re observing. True, we could justify ourselves: the volume of experiments is so large that many can be carried out without delving into the details of the objects under study, relying entirely on the specialists. But that’s for the work side; in a long-duration flight this knowledge is essential for life itself — it’s our spiritual, intellectual nourishment. Over time we felt the need for it and began insisting that the specialists brief us before each task on the objective, the goal, the means, the state of the problem — that they not drag questions out of the crew, but help formulate them and provide answers.

This attitude of the ground toward the crew as mere executors formed in the early days of manned spaceflight, when technology was developing so rapidly that those training for flights were perpetual students chasing after it, while the ground was better prepared because the developers themselves were directly involved in creating and managing the flights, and so their opinions and decisions long remained decisive. There was no end in sight to cosmonauts chasing the technology. And then Sergei Pavlovich Korolev and his first deputy V. P. Mishin decided that flight engineers should be specialists from the design bureau who had gone through a serious school of design, systems development, calculations, testing, flight control, and work on the launch complex. That is, people familiar with the full cycle of preparing space hardware for flight tests. Therefore, possessing engineering experience and having acquired comprehensive systems knowledge in the cosmonaut corps, mastered the experience of previous flights and gained piloting skills on simulators and in actual space missions, they soon rose in their understanding of the technology’s capabilities and specific flight situations far above the narrow specialists. And the time came when the old measures of trust in the crew and some people’s condescension remained unchanged, while the crew’s capabilities had grown far beyond the ground’s understanding.