Jerry Linenger later told me that nobody had ever briefed him, before his visit to Mir, about the history of earlier fires on Russian space stations. Culbertson even later dened knowing about any of them. It seems to me that the only way they could have avoided knowing is that they didn't want to know -- worse, that in order not to interfere with the cooperative projects, they wanted NOT to know about such troubling problems and decided to rely on "hope" instead of sound hazard analysis.

The following article published TWO YEARS BEFORE the Mir fire may provide some historical perspective:

SPACE FIRE -- ONCE BURNED, TWICE SHY // James Oberg //
Originally written Nov 2, 1994, rewritten through mid-January adding the most recent Mir fire and NASA official inputs, published in 'Space News' March 6, 1995, page 15, as "Learning the Wrong Lesson In Space".

Today, as the International Space Station project moves forward, Russians and Americans are teaching each other valuable new spaceflight-related skills. It is ironic that one lesson the Americans may be learning from the Russians is how to cover up inconvenient accidents. An October 15 [1994] fire aboard Russia's Mir space station illustrates the point.

The small fire broke out inside an oxygen generator. As flames and smoke streamed out of the unit, cosmonaut Valeriy Polyakov grabbed a nearby space uniform and covered up the fire while turning off the unit's power. There were no injuries, and no damage beyond some seared paint and a ruined uniform.

Back on Earth, the fire was also covered up. It was not mentioned to the news media, and Russia's new space partners heard stories of "a few sparks". The full story did not get out until Russian journalist Konstantin Lantratov wrote about the incident in the Videocosmos Society's publication, "Russian Space News". The article was based on an in-flight radio interview with Polyakov and a post-flight face-to-face interview with cosmonaut Talgat Musabayev, after he had returned to Earth.

Polyakov stressed that the fire aboard Mir was quickly detected and extinguished. "You can stop the sensation here," he urged Lantratov, and in fact, his experience seems to underscore the Russian feeling that, after all, fires in space may really be no big deal.

Mention the words "fire" and "manned spacecraft" around American space engineers and they react with an instinctive flinch. They shudder to remember how Grissom, White, and Chaffee died. during a launch pad fire in January 1967. Even after almost three decades, the horror of the AS-204 (later called "Apollo-1") pad disaster remains seared into memories both professional and private.

"Once burned, twice shy" is a good proverb with a horrible literal truth for the space profession. In 1961, at the height of hide-the-blemishes communist propaganda, cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died as a result of a fire at the end of a 10-day ground isolation in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. A fire started after he dropped a swab that had been dipped in alcohol onto a hot ring. Although he got out alive, he died soon thereafter in the hospital. The nature of his death was hidden and years later the Apollo-1 astronauts died within minutes as a flash fire swept through a capsule with a pure oxygen atmosphere. It should never have happened, but it did.

That explains why American space engineers are eager to find out all they can about the Russian experience with spacecraft fires. Now that the Russians are participating in the international space station, American astronauts will bet their lives on the competence and candor of Russian space workers.

A European pilot who had been a guest aboard a Russian space station astonished his American hosts on a visit to Houston several years ago when he casually mentioned that the Russians think space fires are "no big deal" since they've had two or three of them on board their spacecraft that were easy to put out. Russians have privately told American colleagues that in the past 20 years spacecraft fire extinguishers had been discharged six times for what the Russians described as "smoke incidents".

A touring Russian cosmonaut, when asked explicitly by a European space historian, provided graphic details about a fire he fought aboard Salyut-6 fifteen years ago: "I just held my breath, pushed in close, and sprayed the foam", he explained, describing how it had made repeated advances and retreats before the fire was out. Some years ago, a cosmonaut official admitted to several small electrical fires that soon went out by themselves.

NASA officials have told me that the Russians have provided information on fire incidents for hardware NASA considers relevant to the safety and reliability of joint U.S.-Russian operations. That information the Russians have given NASA about Russian spacecraft fire suppression and warning systems seems to have satisfied at least top NASA officials that the Russian hardware is safe and reliable. But is limited information enough? The Russians should inform their new partners about all of their experiences with space fires.

The big deal is not the fires in space, but the smoke screens right here on Earth. If a topic as spectacular as manned spacecraft fires can somehow be off limits, suspicions must smolder about what else we are not being told. Worse yet, what are the future consequences of such ignorance for the health and well-being of tomorrow's spacefarers?

Now, once again, with American lives quite possibly dependent on full Russian disclosure of all safety issues, the time for incomplete information is long gone. Only a full disclosure of all such incidents, and the resulting countermeasures, will foster development of the earned trust that the International Space Station needs as its foundation.

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This is the original, rougher unpublished version from Nov. 2, 1994, which contains more details but fewer inputs from "NASA officials". It was written before anybody had learned about the oxygen-generator fire on Mir which had occurred in secret a few weeks earlier:

SPACE FIRE, SPACE SMOKE // James Oberg // Nov 2, 1994

Mention the words "fire" and "manned spacecraft" around American space engineers and they react with an instinctive flinch. They remember how Grissom, White, and Chaffee died. Even after three decades the horror of the AS-204 pad disaster remains seared into memories both professional and private.

Russian space engineers have their own past oversights regarding fire. Although they only killed one man -- trainee cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko -- he died after hours of hopeless agony.

A second reason for Russian shame is that after their professional mistakes had doomed Bondarenko, their political irrationality doomed his American compatriots. For Bondarenko burned to death in 1961, six years before the Apollo Fire. Yet the Russians kept their tragic lessons to themselves and thus made the American side pay again in blood for the same lessons.

Fear of fire in space has eased since those days, since the sea level pressure and composition used by all humanned spacecraft today is much less dangerous than the pure oxygen systems of the past. Greater care is taken in avoiding flammable materials and in providing flight crews with workable extinguishing agents.

The issue of fire in space, however, has returned to the forefront during discussions on the International Space Station Alpha. And it seems the Russians have grown so cavalier about these dangers that they have decided it's still not important to share their flight experiences with the American side. Whatever lessons they have learned from almost a quarter century of space station missions are being kept to themselves, apparently condemning the US side -- once again -- to re-learn it all on its own.

Rumors of fires aboard Soviet space stations have been around for a long time. In the early 1970s I heard a story about a difficult-to-extinguish fire aboard the world's first space station, Salyut-1, in 1971. I mentioned the incident in my 1981 book "Red Star in Orbit". But it took another decade -- and the collapse of communism -- before a memoir was published in a Moscow newspaper about a smoky, smoldering electrical fire that the doomed Salyut-1 cosmonauts had spent hours trying to locate and control.

A European pilot who had been a guest aboard a Russian space station visited Houston several years ago and astonished his American hosts by casually dropping the bombshell that the Russians think space fires are "no big deal" since they've had two or three of them on board, and they were easy to put out. A touring Russian cosmonaut, when asked explicitly by a space historian, provided graphic details about a fire he fought aboard Salyut-6 fifteen years ago: "I just held my breath, pushed in close, and sprayed the foam", he explained, describing how it had made repeated advances and retreats before the fire was out.

In the face of official Russian silence on the question, folklore and fanciful legends spread -- perhaps not entirely by accident. Russians privately told American colleagues that fire extinguishers had been discharged six times for "smoke incidents". Some years ago, a cosmonaut official admitted to several small electrical fires that soon went out by themselves.

An official of the Energiya NPO, which builds and operates manned spacecraft, not long ago told foreign visitors that the air had to be changed once after a fire in a space station left it [the station] inert. In this case, the mythological event could be easily debunked, since it was a garbled combination of an actual air change aboard Salyut-5 (the air was feared contaminated by photographic chemicals in the reconnaissance camera) and an actual visit to an inert station (where an on- board fire was only one of the theories for the station's failure, which actually turned out to be caused by an electrical short).

These stories, then, were worse than useless in understanding the real dangers.

All this confusion and confabulation is merely prologue. Now that the Russians have joined in the International Space Station, their hardware will someday be keeping American personnel alive. Americans will bet their lives on the competence and candor of Russian space workers.

And that's what's so disturbing about a recent official report from Moscow on potential hazards associated with the Russian "service module", which used to be known as Mir-2 before it became a foundation block of the whole complex. Copies have been floating around and outside the space community.

The document provides an official list of all fire incidents aboard all previous Russian space stations. It is a short list, and in fact an empty list. That's because the Russians are now claiming, space scout's honor, that there never has been a single fire ever aboard Russia's space vehicles.

One minor incident involving an electrical short, aboard one Salyut station, was mentioned, but even here, the document asserts, "no fire occurred." Beyond that, a terse descriptor: "None".

But what are we then to make of all the years of "smoke", all those stories and first-hand (but unofficial) reports? Some were garbled, perhaps to cast doubt on the others. But does all that smoke prove the existence of Russian space fires that today's Russian officials pretend never occurred?

"Once burned, twice shy" is a good proverb with a horrible literal truth for the space profession. In the "bad old days" of hide-the-blemishes communist propaganda, Bondarenko's fiery death was hidden, and unwarned U.S. space engineers naively sent three Americans to their deaths. These deaths, in Apollo Program Manager Sam Phillips's opinion, could have been prevented, if the Bondarenko tragedy had only been known about.

Now, once again, with American lives quite possibly dependent on full Russian disclosure, the time for "smokescreens" is long gone. Only full disclosure of such incidents, and resulting countermeasures, will foster the development of the trust that the International Space Station needs as its very foundation. Without it, we'll never get off the ground.

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