Today is a more or less free day. On comm, Viktor Blagov cautiously begins reasoning that if we fly until December 8, there will be ballistics complications on landing day — no daylight for visual orientation checks against the Earth during the deorbit burn. So the landing ought to be moved forward by another two days. He asks: “How do you feel about that?” We laughed and said: “Two days isn’t a month.” We heard him breathe a sigh of relief: “We thought you’d be upset. Good for you — so we fly until December 10.” We asked him to pass on our request to the leadership: after undocking from the station, let us do a manual flyaround, and during landing, let us perform a manual controlled descent.

Today I thought a lot about the station’s architecture and its connections with the computer and the ground. I wrote down several recommendations for the future.

During the light-marker experiment, while searching for the test fields and shifting from 40 degrees to 10 degrees, I lost them and mistakenly held the lights of a small town in the instrument.

Looking at North America, the Florida area. Fires everywhere. Strange. It seems like it’s almost winter — what’s going on?