The world’s only space station goes dark. And now Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev has to lead one of the riskiest missions ever flown in space. He alone is tasked with saving the Soviet Space program from catastrophe. Like what you hear? Follow us @kscope_nyc on Twitter and Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mission Control, just outside of Moscow.
Picture a vast hall with rows of desks and those massive 80s computers.
It's February 1985, and a few ground controllers are trawling through graphs and signals sent from a space station called Salyut 7, the pride and joy of the Soviet space program.
Right now, Salyut7 hasn't got any cosmonauts on board.
It's on autopilot, orbiting the Earth, waiting for its next crew.
So the ground controller's work is fairly routine.
They record data, talk about their weekend plans.
But then, right at the end of the shift, someone notices something weird on one of the dashboards.
There's a light flashing on the control panel, a warning light.
Everyone's on their feet, trying to fix it.
But then another light goes down and another, one by one, the whole dashboard goes dark.
A horrified silence fills the room.
They've just lost the space station.
It's like a dead piece of thing in orbit.
That's Asif Siddiqui, our Soviet space guy.
You heard last time they couldn't find.
Any kind of signal, nothing from the station.
It's essentially floating, spinning, probably out of control in Earth orbit.
And it's huge, this huge chunk of metal.
If they don't control it, it might fall uncontrollably on an inhabited country and it could land on a city, a village somewhere.