Valentin Lebedev
Diary of a Cosmonaut

A hectic day. Sleeping badly, can’t fall asleep until 2-3 AM. And Tolya doesn’t sleep at all — only dozes off toward morning. Lots of chaotic work. We’re crawling into every nook of the station, documenting the condition of the hull — any damage, corrosion, moisture, insulation integrity — and vacuuming everything behind the panels. In the process there are many small “discoveries” — finding everyday items and parts we’d lost at some point, which had been sucked behind the panels by the airflow. On top of that, specialists keep pestering us, asking a mass of questions we’d already answered during the flight, and they either missed them or were too lazy to look up the old records. I’m training in the Chibis — the lower body negative pressure suit — where reduced pressure increases blood flow to the lower body, training the blood vessels that have become deconditioned during the long flight from not experiencing Earth’s blood pressure. We’ve quickly gotten used to these exercises. I like them for the feeling of cardiac workload, the mild dizziness, and the pleasant heaviness in the legs, and above all the sensation that the body is operating under new conditions, different from weightlessness. In the evening we had planned a television report on the results of our work, but it fell through due to poor communications. In the evening, some of the guys came to TsUP — Lyakhov, Alexandrov, Savitskaya. We had a good, cheerful talk.