A day of testing the automatic navigation methodology with the Puma sight in Mode 67. Everything was going well, but for the third time Delta gave a synchronization error — the machine time and Moscow time diverged by one hour and everything went haywire. We’re at a loss about what to do next — the day’s program is on the verge of collapse. The ground is silent. I sense the specialists are thinking not about the machine’s glitch but assuming it’s my error.

The tension mounts; no recommendations, and we pass into the next orbit. Calmly, though my gut feels rotten, I shut the computer down on my own authority. We manually built the baseline orientation, restarted the computing system, re-entered the programs, and carried out the autonomous navigation mode. Then I called up from the computer the station’s axis coordinates in space and compared them against the reference star coordinates. The match turned out to be very high. The ground is pleased, but the aftertaste of their hesitation and doubt lingers. During the session I couldn’t hold back and told Igor Nikolaevich, the Delta specialist, that in difficulties we need to be comrades, not spectators. He replied: “Valentin, I’m sorry. I understand.”

The ballistics team asked us to assess how the gravitational orientation is holding up. We checked; by the sights, the deviation from vertical in pitch and roll is about 3 degrees, so everything is fine.

In the next comm session, the head of the Delta mathematical-support department, Ernest Valentinovich, came on and said they had filed an invention application with my name on it — for the new navigation modes I designed with them and am now testing in flight.