Close Call over Kazakhstan

By John Greenwald

"Accident! The engine worked 60 seconds and then shut off."

Never before had the world received so stunning a glimpse of a Soviet space crisis. Cramped inside a tiny capsule 155 miles above the earth, Commander Vladimir Lyakhov radioed mission control that something was desperately wrong. Seated beside him was a hastily trained Afghan cosmonaut, Abdul Ahad Mohmand. Replied a ground controller: "How are things with food?" Lyakhov: "There is no food." Controller: "What about the emergency rations?" Lyakhov: "They are there, but why touch them? We will be patient," he added, noting that there was no way to rid themselves of wastes.

The near tragedy exposed some operational flaws in a Soviet space program that, in manned flight at least, has far outstripped its U.S. counterpart. American experts said the Kremlin had precipitately scheduled the mission as a gesture of Soviet-Afghan friendship before Soviet troops complete their pullout from Afghanistan early next year. The hurried launch gave the three- man crew only six months to prepare as a team for a voyage that normally requires a full year of intensive training. Soviet space officials later conceded that the cosmonauts may have "lost vigilance" during the flight.

Trouble struck the Soyuz TM-5 spacecraft soon after it left the Soviet orbiting space station Mir and started on its way home. The cosmonauts had just completed a six-day mission in which they performed routine experiments with the two Mir cosmonauts, who are spending a year in space. Lyakhov, 47, and Mohmand, 29, an Afghan pilot, had returned to the two-stage Soyuz capsule for the three-hour trip back to the Soviet Union, leaving Physician Valeri Polyakov behind to continue monitoring the health of the station crew.

The two successfully completed the separation from Mir early Tuesday morning, then crawled into the cramped re-entry vehicle and jettisoned the compartment of the Soyuz craft that contained toilet facilities and living space. They had just settled in to await the firing of the computer-controlled rocket that was programmed to decelerate the spacecraft from its orbital speed for the descent into the atmosphere. Accounts of what happened next differ, but indications are that as the ship passed through a twilight region of space between day and night, an infrared sensor, which fixes the spacecraft's position in relation to earth, was confused by rays of sunlight. The unexpected signal caused the computer to abort the normal firing.

When the re-entry manuever was attempted again, three hours later, the rocket abruptly stopped after just seven seconds. Reason: it had apparently not occurred to either the cosmonauts or the ground controllers to reprogram the computer for the spacecraft's new position. Lyakhov responded by pressing a manual button to restart the engine, but the computer again cut off the rocket. Admitted the cosmonaut afterward: "I am not excusing myself. There was fault there."

By then the situation was critical. Strapped into stiff re-entry suits inside the 107-cu.-ft. lander, the cosmonauts could hardly move. They had food and air for perhaps three days. A surrealistic touch was added by a bag of live fish that had been used in an experiment and occupied the third seat in the lander. Mission-control engineers were concerned that ice could form inside the vehicle and freeze the cosmonauts -- and the fish -- to death.

With time running out, ground controllers reprogrammed the Soyuz computers and simulated new re-entry paths. Finally, at 4:50 a.m. Wednesday, 26 hours after the initial mishap, the wayward capsule floated beneath an orange-and- white parachute onto the desert in Soviet Kazakhstan, landing in a puff of sand only six miles from its replotted touchdown.

Lyakhov had barely stepped out before Soviet space officials began assessing blame. In a rare outburst of criticism, Viktor Blagov, a deputy mission- control chief, scolded the cosmonaut for failing to use manual controls to land the spacecraft. But Yevgeni Bogomolov, research director for Glavkosmos, the Soviet space agency, defended Lyakhov and criticized mission-control planners for failing to understand "nuances" in the computer program.

However, that was not the end of the headaches for Soviet space officials. By week's end ground problems had disabled Moscow's unmanned Phobos 1 Mars probe, which was launched in July. After first losing contact with the craft, Moscow said a controller had sent an incorrect command that left the vehicle "frozen" and virtually useless. Phobos 2, the probe's Mars-bound twin, remained on course for a January orbit.

Some U.S. scientists blamed the Soyuz mishap on what James Oberg, a Houston- based Soviet space expert, called the "incredible haste" with which that mission was flown. Oberg said the late-summer launch had led to the disorienting encounter with the sun's rays. He calculated that the cosmonauts had narrowly avoided falling into an unstable, atmosphere-grazing orbit. Had that occurred, both they and their capsule would have been completely incinerated.

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/Moscow and Richard Woodbury/Houston