After ground controllers lost all contact with the Salyut 7 space station, Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh launched to manually dock with the tumbling, powerless craft, entering a freezing, ice-coated interior. Their painstaking repair of the station's electrical system, working in bulky suits in near-total darkness, became one of the most celebrated feats of orbital engineering in the Soviet space program.
Salyut 7 had gone completely silent in early 1985 after a electrical fault, leaving the station tumbling uncontrolled through orbit, its batteries drained, its interior temperature plunging toward freezing, its systems entirely dead. No robotic probe of the era could dock with a non-cooperative, power-less target, so Moscow turned to its most trusted manual docking specialist, Vladimir Dzhanibekov, and flight engineer Viktor Savinykh, sending them up in a Soyuz on what amounted to a spacewalk-era salvage operation.
Dzhanibekov performed the docking entirely by eye and feel, matching the station's tumble using only a handheld laser rangefinder and binoculars, since Salyut 7 had no power to assist. Once aboard, the cosmonauts found a station coated in frost, condensation frozen into sheets on every wall, and air so cold they worked in fur-lined jackets, breath visibly clouding in front of their faces.
Over the following days—continuing after their May 9 docking well into subsequent weeks—they systematically diagnosed the failed battery charging circuit, rewired components by hand, and slowly nursed the station's systems back from the dead, restoring heat, light, and eventually a habitable atmosphere. Their success meant Salyut 7 could host additional crews and experiments through the rest of 1985, and the mission remains a textbook case cited by NASA and Roscosmos alike in discussions of spacecraft recovery and human ingenuity under extreme constraint.
Key people: Vladimir Dzhanibekov, Viktor Savinykh