Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 3, 1994 TAG: 9409070032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
The tricky link-up by Lt. Col. Yuri Malenchenko, a first in Moscow's annals of space achievement, saved $60 million worth of research equipment, food and supplies for scheduled manned missions with the European Space Agency next month and the United States in March.
Russian space officials said failure to dock the freighter on the third try would have forced the three cosmonauts aboard to abandon the Mir station. That, they said, would have delayed or even canceled the joint missions, worth millions of dollars in revenues.
Facing his first emergency after two months in space, Malenchenko was under severe pressure. The ITAR-Tass news agency said the survival of Russia's space program ``now rests literally in the hands of one man.''
Technicians at the flight-control center in Kaliningrad guided the 32-year-old cosmonaut through his task by radio as he soared over the Atlantic Ocean late Friday afternoon and burst into cheers when he succeeded.
Malenchenko, a former air force fighter pilot, controlled both the Mir station and the freighter Progress. From a command module of the Mir, he watched television images beamed from the robot freighter that simulated the view from its driver's seat.
When the two vessels were about 150 yards apart, space officials said, he activated the remote controls and steered the Progress home at about one foot per second toward a conical target 2 feet in diameter.
Cosmonauts shuttle to the space station aboard rocket ships and are resupplied regularly by rocket-borne freighters. With the Mir station's food due to run out in mid-September and no backup rocket ready, everything depended on the Progress and its 2.6-ton cargo, launched Aug. 25.
by CNB