How to drink cognac and go on strike in space: scary, funny and mysterious stories of astronauts

Almost all boys in childhood dreamed of becoming astronauts — it's an honorable profession, even a heroic one. There are many stories in the history of cosmonautics that make the hair stand on end. But funny moments also happen. "Futurist" told scary, mysterious and funny stories that happened to astronauts.

In the skin of a dinosaur

In 1995, test cosmonaut, member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics named after K.E. Tsiolkovsky Sergey Krichevsky, speaking at the Novosibirsk International Institute of Space Anthropology, spoke about the phenomenon that people face in space. According to him, this strangeness can be compared with a state of altered consciousness. Allegedly, the cosmonaut comes out of his human form, turns into some kind of animal and moves to another environment. At the same time, everything is quite realistic, and an astronaut may think that he is going crazy. Such changes can occur in space during a night's sleep or even a day's rest.

Some of the astronauts deny this phenomenon, while others simply consider it nightmares.

Strike in space

The strike of the crew of the American space station Skylab-4 was the first and so far the only mutiny of astronauts in space, at least according to the official version. The expedition, which started on November 16, 1973, set a record for the duration of a person's stay in space — 84 days. Years later, this record was broken more than once. For the crew of Skylab-4, which consisted entirely of newcomers, the workload was extremely heavy. Crew members Carr, Pogue and Gibson complained of physical and psychological workload.

Gerald Carr sent alarming messages on the air: "We need more time to rest. We need a schedule that is not so crowded. We don't want to exercise after eating. We want everything to be under control."

As a result, on the eve of the New Year, the astronauts lost their nerves. On December 28, 1973, the crew stopped communicating with the NASA ground control center.

The astronauts rested all day, had fun and enjoyed the views of the Earth. The next day, the crew switched on the communication and continued working. After the strike, experts tried to determine its causes, and one of the consequences was the decision that at least one member of the ISS crew should be a veteran, that is, not for the first time to fly into space.

The Apollo 13 accident

The American Apollo 13 space mission launched on April 11, 1970. The purpose of this mission was landing on the moon and its comprehensive study. On the second day of the flight, when the ship was 330 thousand kilometers away from Earth, an explosion of the oxygen tank occurred. Two out of three fuel cells failed. The astronauts, including Jim Lowell, Freud Hayes and John Swigert, had to take a risk and pump energy from the command module. Although, in theory, this energy should have been used only when returning to Earth. The crew turned off some life support systems, the navigation system stopped working. The situation was critical.

There was no question of landing on the moon. The NASA Mission Control Center gathered the best specialists and began a mission to rescue the astronauts as soon as possible. As a result, they disconnected the command compartment and moved to the lunar module "Aquarius". One of the problems was time — it took about 100 hours for the astronauts to return to Earth. Aquarius, when almost all systems were turned off, could support the life of astronauts for 84 hours. The crew made a ventilation system that took the air away from the Aquarius and returned it purified.

The problem of the trajectory from which the ship strayed during the return was solved by Lowell. Along the border of the day and night sides of the planet, he himself leveled the flight of the ship. The astronauts returned to Earth unharmed — they landed in the Pacific Ocean. It was after this accident, or rather after the movie "Apollo 13", which was based on this story, that the phrase "Houston, we have a problem" came into use. John Swigert said it, addressing the NASA flight control center, which was located in Houston.

Cosmic Knock

The life of astronauts is not only important space missions, but also a lot of funny stories. One of these occurred in 1963 on the Vostok-5 ship. On the morning of June 18, Khabarovsk received an alarming message from the Hawk (the call sign of the pilot of the Vostok-5 spacecraft Valery Bykovsky): "At 9:5 there was a cosmic knock."

As Aviation Colonel-General Nikolai Kamanin wrote in his diary, Sergei Korolev instructed him to deal with this knock and talk to Bykovsky. Kamanin gathered specialists, together with whom they tried to understand the reason for the mysterious knock. Only then they contacted Bykovsky. "To my first question about the nature of the knock, Valery replied that he did not understand what kind of knock he was talking about. I told him that it was about a cosmic knock that he had heard. Bykovsky burst out laughing and said:

Bykovsky was congratulated on the world record, as he was the first person to do it in space, and wished him a happy flight.

Buckwheat and cognac

Officially, you can't drink alcohol in space. But throughout the history of near-Earth space exploration, astronauts have violated this prohibition. This was also the case in the Soviet Union. Georgy Grechko told how on his second flight, when he arrived at the Salyut-6 station, together with Yuri Romanenko, they found a flask with the inscription "Eleutherococcus-K". This is an energy drink that helps to withstand loads. But there was one and a half liters of cognac in the flask.

We decided to take 7.5 grams a day — before going to bed. According to Grechko, cognac saved them from severe colds, toothache and hypothermia of the legs. But when half of the flask was empty, cognac and air mixed into a foam, which it became impossible to squeeze out. The astronauts even tried to get cognac using a bellows to collect urine, but it didn't work out.

But the next crew managed to finish the cognac Grechko and Romanenko. "That's what we did. One took the neck in his mouth and rose to the ceiling. The second beat him on the head. And when he flew down with the flask, the cognac by inertia rushed into his mouth."

That's how, beating each other, they finished the cognac.

Space debris

Astronauts are making their contribution to the aggravation of the problem of space debris. For example, in March 2017, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson lost part of the screen that protects the ISS from micrometeorites. Somehow, this piece of the screen fell out of my hands and flew into space. In 2008, American astronaut Heidemarie Stefanishin-Piper was repairing a solar battery on the ISS, and her grease gun exploded. While she was trying to clean the video camera from the oil that leaked from the gun, a bag of tools slipped out of her hands and also flew into space.

A year earlier, in 2007, astronaut Scott Paradzinski accidentally lost pliers in outer space, and in 2006 Pierce Sellers dropped a spatula. One of the earliest and most famous cases of loss is the glove of American astronaut Ed White. He dropped it in 1965 while working in outer space. The glove flew in orbit for another month until it burned up in the Earth's atmosphere.