Day off. Today at 14:20 the launch of Progress-16. Slept 12 hours, though afterward I luxuriated for another three hours in a half-doze. Got up, ate, and started preparing for tomorrow’s workday. The program calls for maintenance and repair of the station — we’ll be tracing the circuits of the thermal-regulation system (STR), since there have been issues with temperature control. We’ll also be running partial diagnostic tests to figure out why the Korund furnace keeps glitching when it reaches crystallization temperature. You’d think this could be done tomorrow, but it’s better to prepare in advance. The ground allots only 30 minutes for this, yet today we spent 2 hours just getting ready. Thirty minutes is when everything is laid out, set up, and identified, but here it’s like a giant storeroom — you have to rummage through a lot to find what you need, check instruments and power supplies, select tools, and clear access to the work site. After all, tracing a few connectors isn’t like checking an outlet at home. The cable bundles, thick coils of wiring, are sealed behind panels, tightly taped so they don’t come apart, and they contain dozens, hundreds of connectors. Finding the right one by its number is no trivial task. In short, as in any job, the bulk of the time goes into preparation.
Traditional photograph — cosmonauts with their wives on Red Square before departure for the Baikonur cosmodrome. In the photo (left to right): A. N. Berezovoy, L. G. Berezovaya, L. V. Lebedeva, and V. V. Lebedev.
During the day they organized a recreation program for us. Kobzev got in touch with the Kantemirovskaya Division, where my father served and where I graduated from school, and invited the school director, Anna Petrovna, to speak with us. She says to me: “Valentin, remember your jump from the school window that spring in 10th grade? And how they told you then that because of your foolishness you’d never fly?” How could I forget! We were studying “The Young Guard” at the time, and we all admired Seryozhka Tyulenin for his boyish daring, his courage, openness, and devotion. And I decided to test myself — what am I capable of? If I jump from the second floor of the school, I’ll be a pilot. And though I ended up in the hospital afterward and walked on crutches, three months later I still enrolled in the Orenburg Flight School. And then Timonin, the TV host, says to me: “Everyone thinks cosmonauts were straight-A students with perfect behavior, but Anna Petrovna told us during the break that you were neither — yet in the cosmonaut corps you pass every exam with top marks. How is that possible?” I don’t know. Probably in school other interests overpowered the understanding of the need to study well. Running around, mischief, sports — so much opens up in life, and here’s this tedious studying day after day. But when a dream appeared, it pulled me out — there was nowhere to go, I had to study or keep fooling around. Now I’m in the groove, though sometimes laziness creeps in — only now it comes from fatigue, not from laziness itself. But standing right beside it is always the understanding: I must.
In the evening I prepared a new jumpsuit for the holiday — the one I’ve been wearing for two months is all worn through.
A goal I believe in is my driving force, and no whirlpools of life can keep me from reaching it.