Did you go before leaving the space station?

Soyuz TM-6Cosmonauts Vladimir Lyakhov and Abdul Ahad Mohmand, the first Afghan in space, undock from the Mir space station and prepare to return home, jettisoning the orbital module of their Soyuz TM-5 space capsule per standard procedure. But their descent module – the only part of a Soyuz that ever returns to Earth intact – experiences numerous technical glitches, and ground controllers in the Soviet Union order them to stay in orbit for an extra day. That’s easy enough for engineers on Earth to say: the abandoned orbital module contains the only toilet facilities on a Soyuz spacecraft, leaving the crew to hold everything until their return on September 7th; there is also no fresh water available. Needless to say, Soviet mission planners redraw the rules of future missions to keep the orbital module attached until the last possible moment with safety guidelines.

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