The Soviet Station That Nearly Killed Its Crew Twice

How did the space station Mir, a Soviet machine flying on under Russia, come so close to killing its crew twice in a single year? First, an oxygen candle bursts into flame and the smoke spreads faster than anyone expected. Then a cargo ship, flown in by hand to save money, punctures the hull. Last comes the harder question: who got the blame, and should they have? You leave knowing how a tired station's crew kept it alive with whatever was at hand. ARCHIVE FOOTAGE Archive footage: NASA, Internet Archive, US National Archives. MUSIC Music licensed from Epidemic Sound. PHOTOS Billy Brown — CC BY 2.0 — https://www.flickr.com/photos/3816885... CHAPTERS 0:00 Two Close Calls in 1997 1:28 A Crowded Station, an Oxygen Candle 2:21 Fire in Kvant-1 3:40 How Long Did It Burn? 4:39 Saving Money With TORU 6:52 Flying Blind to the Station 8:22 Collision and Dinner Knife 9:09 Power Lost, Station Spinning 10:38 Who Got the Blame 12:29 Repairs and Mir's End SOURCES Jerry M. Linenger — Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir (2000) Bryan Burrough — Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir (1998) NASA — Phase 1 Program Joint Report (Shuttle-Mir) (1999) David M. Harland — The Story of Space Station Mir (2005) Wikipedia — Mir — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir Wikipedia — Mir EO-23 Wikipedia — Progress M-34 TAGS mir space station, mir fire, mir collision, progress m-34 collision, spektr module, aleksandr lazutkin, vasily tsibliyev, michael foale, jerry linenger, mir nearly killed its crew, oxygen candle fire, toru manual docking, soviet space station, russian space station, space station accident, spaceflight disasters, space history documentary, once upon an engine, failed machines, machines that failed, engineering disasters, engineering history, forgotten machines