Interlude: Graveyard Orbit
The Earth was bright beneath Kostya’s feet, and a blue more intense than any he had seen before. White clouds sped past 300 km below, and he could make out the wakes of ships on the surface of the ocean. Thousands of people must be in his field of view right now. Even with no land in sight, Earth teamed with life.
Above was blackness. With his sun visor down, no stars were visible. The black above was as intense as the blue below. As black as death. But that was okay. Kostya had done his duty, to his motherland and to humanity. He had kept that blue orb safe from the follies of mankind.
There were worse ways to die.
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It was the Novaya Gazeta paper that first publicly broke the story of the Zarya 3 accident. Official TASS reporting of the mission had noted the successful return of the crew of Slava 35 the previous week, marking the end of permanent habitation of the space station after more than six years in orbit. They had further reported the successful separation of the station’s EYaRD nuclear reactor a few days later, which was to be boosted by its built-in propulsion system into a graveyard orbit, high enough that it would remain in space for hundreds of years, until its radioactive core had safely decayed. Then the reports stopped.
Novaya Gazeta had been founded in Moscow just a year earlier, one of the first independent newspapers to emerge under the Glasnost reforms. With the Soviet population starved for anything but official news, its circulation had increased rapidly, and it had expanded to cover most of western Russia and parts of Ukraine and Belarus. Following a model well known to Western tabloids, sensational stories of political scandals and the corruption and immorality of the ruling classes formed the bedrock its coverage. But it also employed a science editor who took a keen interest in the space programme, and had a number of contacts at Kaliningrad, Star City, and other space centres. It was one of those contacts, looking to supplement his state salary with an unofficial bonus from the press, that had reached out with news that all was not well with the Zarya 3 decommissioning mission. After making some calls (from public phone boxes, just in case) and a clandestine meeting in Gorky park, the editor had been convinced of the public interest and commercial merits of the story. So it was that the morning edition of Novaya Gazeta on Tuesday 28th June 1988 led with the headline: “Nuclear Reactor Stranded in Orbit”.
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Kostya spun slowly in space. Just a gentle turning, maybe three revolutions per minute. It helped to even out the heating of his suit while he was in the harsh sunlight of space. But now he had crossed the terminator, and was about to pass into the shadow of the Earth. By bad luck his spin was such that, when the sun finally passed below the horizon, it was hidden behind the bulk of his backpack and manoeuvring unit, and so Kostya missed the beauty of an orbital sunset. Well, there would be another in ninety minutes, if he should choose to wait for it.
With the sun now hidden, Kostya was able to raise his visor and finally see the stars. So many! So bright and steady! Kostya had grown up in Leningrad, where the clouds and the city lights conspired to make the stars invisible most nights. But he remembered visiting his grandfather in the country, and piercing clear winter nights on the shore of Lake Onega, when it seemed there were more stars than grains of sand on a beach. Now, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Kostya was treated to the same glorious sight.
It was awesome, but at the same time it made him feel queasy. An uneasy feeling in his stomach that Kostya could not remember feeling since his first days in cosmonaut training, when they’d strapped him to a spinning metal frame to test his balance - or to try to drive out those not suited to life as a spaceman. Kostya had never been bothered by motion sickness after that, whether flying high performance jets, piloting the Baikal Shuttle Aero-analogue, or on his two missions to Zarya. But now…
Ah. Of course. It had started.
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Zarya 3 had been designed for an operational lifetime of five years, and its EYaRD reactor had been sized accordingly. There was some margin built into the design that would allow that lifetime to be extended a little further, but operating the station beyond 1988 would mean either refuelling or replacing the reactor, neither of which was practical. At some point it would be necessary to abandon the station while they still had control to safely dispose of the reactor.
Boosting the entire space station into a high enough orbit for safety would mandate the use of an unreasonably large propulsion system, and so the reactor had been designed to separate from the station and put itself into a graveyard orbit using its own, dedicated propulsion system. This engine would have to remain dormant for the whole operational lifetime of the station, with most of that time spent in the increased radiation environment directly behind the reactor’s biological shield. It was therefore kept as simple as possible, with redundant control systems, and using the same self-igniting storable propellants as the main station propulsion system. The tanks would be kept empty for the most part, to be filled from the station’s main tanks by the final crew to visit the station. Once the crew were back on Earth and clear of any potential radiation hazard, the reactor and its propulsion system would separate from the station and push itself into a stable 1 500 km orbit.
When finally called into action, the separation system worked perfectly. The propulsion system did not. The highly radioactive Zarya 3 reactor was left stranded, with tanks full of pressurised, toxic propellant, in a low Earth orbit. Unless something was done, it would re-enter the atmosphere in just over a year.
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The air in his visor was rancid now with the fumes of his vomit, but there was mercifully little liquid floating in his faceplate. Understanding what the mission ahead could entail - and knowing better than most what the consequences would be - Kostya had fasted before his mission, so there was little in his stomach to bring up. What droplets had emerged were streaked red with blood. They adhered to his visor, obscuring his view of the stars outside. The feelings of nausea had subsided for now, but Kostya knew they would be back, and that the aching in his muscles - in his very bones - would only get worse.
That was how it had been for his father. A worker at the Leningrad-1 power plant, his father had been on duty when a cooling unit had exploded, just a few months after the station came online. The blast had released a reservoir of contaminated water, and Kotsya’s father had almost drowned before the flood subsided as the radioactive liquid flowed out into the Baltic. He had been rushed to hospital, where Kostya had taken his mother and tried to visit him, but soldiers guarding the hospital ward had blocked their path. Kostya had caught a glimpse of his father vomiting blood, before they had been bundled away.
He had never seen his father again. Even at the funeral, three weeks later, the coffin had been sealed. The newspapers were silent, no official statement was made. It was more than ten years later that Kostya had finally found out what had happened, sharing an illicit bottle of vodka with one of his father’s old co-workers during Gorbachev’s temperance campaign.
Kostya was not going to die that way.
He reached for the oxygen valve.
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The loss of the Zarya 3 reactor had placed the Soviets in an impossible position. The US had quickly confirmed the reports from Novaya Gazeta, and leaders from every nation on Earth were demanding to know what the Soviets planned to do about it. With no way of controlling its orbital descent, the reactor could come down almost anywhere. Although the reactor module had been designed to survive a launch explosion, there was no practical way to design a reactor that would remain intact after a fall from orbit, even if it somehow made it through the upper atmosphere without cracking open. Suppose it came down over a major city? Millions of people could be contaminated.
Unfortunately, the reactor was not cooperating. There was still no response to ground commands, and telescopic observations suggested that it had started to tumble, most likely as a result of a leak of either propellant or the cesium coolant gas. Even under ideal conditions, attaching a replacement booster under automatic control would be challenging. Trying to dock an uncrewed space tug (even assuming the Soviets had such a thing, which they didn’t) to a non-cooperative, randomly spinning target was just not feasible.
Even given all that and assuming a replacement booster could be attached, leaving the reactor in orbit - even a stable graveyard orbit - had become politically impossible. It would become a literal sword of Damocles over the world, a constant reminder of Soviet failure and recklessness. The leadership was clear that the reactor must be retrieved and safely disposed of, and there was only one possible means of doing so in the time available: Baikal.
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It was quiet now, with the fans switched off. Dark, too, as he passed over the sleeping Earth. The pain in his limbs was slowly subsiding, though he was starting to develop a headache. Radiation, or CO2 poisoning, he wondered.
Not long now.
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The space shuttle Tsiklon lifted off on the evening 14th November 1988. The N-1 rocket that carried her, vehicle 40L, had been hastily repurposed from the planned Zvezda 13/14 lunar mission. As she lifted from the pad, the roar of her rockets was joined by the clanging of dozens of lost tools and loose fittings left behind from the hurried preparations. No fewer than four of her NK-35 engines failed during ascent, but it was not enough to stop her. Almost two decades of upgrades had left the N-1 a far more resilient beast than that first, crude rocket. The fires were contained behind protective shields, soon extinguished by a dedicated suppression system. The twenty engines remaining extended their burns, compensating for their fallen comrades to push the stack to the brink of space, where the Blok-B engines could take up the burden. By the time the hydorlox engines of Blok-V-III shut down, the orbiter was left in a low but serviceable suborbital arc, peaking at just a few kilometres below its intended altitude. An extended burn from Tsiklon’s’s DOM orbital manoeuvring engines were enough to correct the shortfall.
TASS was reporting that Tsiklon had been specially modified to protect the crew during their mission, and that the habitable portions of the orbiter were lined with lead to block atomic radiation. This was not true, and all four members of the shuttle’s crew knew it. The sarcophagus in the payload bay, which would be used to secure and return the reactor, was heavily shielded. But with the reactor spinning, it would not be possible to approach in a way that would keep the shuttle within the radiation shadow of the biological shield, meaning they would all be exposed to an elevated dose that could trigger cancers in the years to come. The cosmonauts were aware of the risk, and all had accepted it as being necessary to protect people on the ground.
Tsiklon rendezvoused with the reactor on the day after launch. The plan was to approach within a dozen metres of the slowly spinning module and snare it with a type of improvised weighted net, fired by a compressed gas canister attached to the shuttle’s SBM robot arm. Once entangled in the net, it would be reeled in and placed into the sarcophagus. The net would then be cut loose of the SBM, while a series of cables within the sarcophagus tightened around the reactor and secured it in place for re-entry.
Tsikon’s SBM carried three of the snare net devices. The first two missed. The third hit, but failed to wrap around the module, instead slowly rebounding towards the orbiter. Tsiklon’s pilot was forced to back away from the reactor while a guillotine cut the net loose, to avoid it tangling on the orbiter.
Mission planners had considered the possibility that the jerry-rigged snares might not work, and they had prepared a back-up plan. Someone would have to go outside in a spacesuit and manoeuvring unit, grab the reactor, stop its spin, and attach a grapple point for the SBM to grab on.
Everyone knew this was a suicide mission.
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There was no pain anymore, just a dreamy sensation. Ahead, through the soiled visor, Kostya could see the first hints of the coming dawn. A bright arc of light along the limb of the Earth, with only the occasional blot of a shadowed cloud marring that perfect curve. The arc spread and shifted in colour; a blue fringe of atomic oxygen, the rusty-red glow of sunlight scattered around the planet’s curve. Then the piercing white light of the sun rose above the horizon, blinding without his sun visor down. It moved steadily higher, spreading light and warmth and joy across the beautiful landscape below.
High above the planet he had given his life to protect, Konstantin Dmitriyevich Plushenko moved towards the light.
