Probably everyone remembers the pride of the Russian cosmonautics of the 90s - the Mir orbital station, which for some reason had to be hastily flooded in 2001, exactly 16 years ago, in the bottomless depths of the Pacific Ocean. But our story is not about the exploits and achievements of the late USSR, but about interesting and courageous people who stood behind this titanic work and achievements and, in obscurity, ensured the work of this giant contraption hovering in zero gravity.
And the instructive story of the military programmer Mikhail, who had the rank of major, but once rebelled against the entire system, tells the best about this period in the history of the former USSR.
Let's tell this story from the very beginning.
The pride of the domestic space industry
Before the flight to the orbital complex "Mir" of the French cosmonaut, the European Space Agency (ESA) closely followed the operation of the equipment of the Russian space complex "Mir" as never before. And even then ESA was, to put it mildly, in shock - one refusal of the station was replaced by another, and the French did not understand at all how “all this” could be controlled remotely from Earth.
Actually, all the daily work of the then shift accompanying Mir was reduced to an unquenchable struggle against the refusal of something, after which the next refusal of something else immediately followed - and this routine already bore some kind of stamp of routine for the Russian employees of the MCC …
It must be admitted that even then Mir was on fire … But people went to work, sent expeditions, and the essence of all their activity behind the pathetic speeches and official plans, as a rule, boiled down to only one thing - to stretch out at least a little more, to ensure survivability the rapidly aging station for another month, six months, and so on.
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Raising the telemetry channel
Wishing to save the delicate nerves of the French, and along the way the far from iron nerves of partners who continued to generously pay for their scientific programs aboard the Mir, the MCC made a wise decision to install a special web server, from which from now on and forever begin broadcasting into the abyss of the global network Internet in real time all telemetry data on the current state of the station.
Protected access to this broadcast has been made available to all ESA European partners and space centers. This solved two problems at once.
Since then, everything has been relatively good - a lot of European (and not only) cosmonauts have flown to Mir, and everything would have remained well and further … but these mysterious Russians somehow suddenly decided to flood their station.
Well, the Europeans took it partly with understanding: if the expiration date of the equipment has expired, then the further operation of the station is really impossible and dangerous, even if it (the equipment) works, according to the data it receives, quite reliably and regularly …
Underground knock
But that was only a necessary introduction, and now the story itself. And this whole story, unpleasant for our programmer Mikhail, began immediately from the moment of the rapid fall of the Mir station into the Pacific Ocean.
Photo: Soyuz TM-24, docked to the transfer compartment of the Mir orbital station
After the sinking, the European Space Agency, which monitored the work of the Russian space station remotely and around the clock, expressed its bewilderment at the ongoing broadcast of the telemetry data stream from … on board the Mir station. Technically, it looked as if all of the station's instruments were operating normally as usual.
Then the Germans joined the French - they were quite surprised when they rewound the chronology of the events and found that when entering the dense layers of the atmosphere, the temperature and pressure inside the Mir station did not change at all. Okay, they decided - at first they blamed everything on the delay of packets in the network and the total latency of the signal, which was first received from the station by Russia and only then relayed to the network.
But the further, the more difficult it was to explain what was happening with a network delay - telemetric data, from which it followed that everything was normal at the station, continued to arrive even when the tourists were already collecting debris in the area of the fall.
As you know, six days after the fall of the station, its wreckage had already been put up for sale at the eBay world auction, and at that very time, foreign experts were quietly going crazy over the data received from the Mir board - despite minor pressure fluctuations, all was within normal limits, except that the radiation was a little more than usual, but the light sensors just showed that the station had entered a part of space illuminated by the sun … In short, the normal everyday life of an ordinary space station continued further.
On the seventh day, unable to bear it, the Europeans sent a request to the Russian side through the RCA to explain what was happening. The Russians politely and succinctly reassured their foreign colleagues, stating that they would "certainly take action," after which the telemetry flow abruptly stopped.
After thinking for another two days, the Germans decided to write another request, in which they asked to explain in more detail what was the cause of such an incident. Once again, an indistinct message quickly came from Moscow that “these are all hacker tricks,” but thanks for your concern, colleagues, we coped with it on our own, the danger is over.
Intrigue is gaining momentum
At first the Germans thought about the answer for a long time and even began to quietly calm down somehow, but the signal from the Mir station … resumed again! Again, all the abundance of technical data on the parameters of the manned station and its equipment began to flow, megabytes of measurement data fell, this time only one thing has changed - now the signal was not encrypted and was conducted completely openly to the entire network, that is, anyone who wanted without any password could connect and receive information … from the Soviet-Russian space station flooded a week ago.
In the photo: blocks of the Mir station
And then the Europeans were already quite worried. At the same time, an unusual message appeared on the central web server of the MCC, where an unknown programmer-major Mikhail in pure Russian among a heap of English-language materials and press releases fires up his leadership and, in particular, as if between the lines, explains the essence of what is happening.
However, his message did not last long - after a couple of hours this mysterious page with a message to the "world community" disappeared forever from the Roscosmos website.
The answer to the telemetry phenomenon
It turned out that when the Europeans became very interested in their Russian colleagues about a series of failures of their equipment and chronic malfunctions at the Mir station, which, as it were, called into question the uninterrupted financing of a number of foreign scientific programs and joint projects, the Russians, without hesitation, wrote a program, which randomly generated all telemetry data from the station, completely emulating its operation, and at the same time the fluctuation range of all parameters did not go beyond the acceptable and reasonable.
In the photo: a model of the orbital station "Mir" in the State Polytechnic Museum
In fact, the Mir station was literally dying, long and painfully, and the manned expeditions sent there repeatedly saved it from another paralysis - according to some unofficial evidence, this took the lion's share of the time of each crew. And when, nevertheless, the historical and official decision on its flooding was made, the situation had already gone so far that in the bright future of Russian cosmonautics there was clearly a direct danger that the Mir would literally crumble into pieces, and it was mortally dangerous to delay its flooding …
It is worth recalling once again that against this background of the daily heroic and tragic struggle of the Russian people for the visibility of the operation of its space station to the West, continuous traffic of ideal telemetric data on the state of the station flowed regularly, which made it possible to regularly earn extra money as a great space power in many joint scientific projects …
In the photo: 1990 postage stamp of the USSR with the image of the Mir station
After the station was suddenly flooded with a pile of important events, the flight control management somehow completely forgot about this telemetry generator, the streams of garbage data from which the expert community of Europe was still very carefully and around the clock studying.
Two days later, after an official request from Europe, the generator was found along with its programmer, and then safely turned off. But as was promised to the European colleagues, “appropriate measures” were taken - in this case, against the programmer who had overlooked “this case”.
In reality, this was reflected in the fact that the programmer - the creator of the program was disciplined, but the worst thing for him - he was thrown out of the queue for a departmental apartment, for which, in fact, he steadfastly and endured "all the hardships of army life."
Having received such a gift from the furious management, a couple of days later he personally published his message on the MCC's official website explaining what was happening and, in confirmation, posted the source code of the generator itself, written, by the way, in the language popular at that time "Turbo Pascal".
Photo: station "Mir" June 12, 1998
This revenge was simply terrible in power. A powerful blow was dealt to the reputation of Roscosmos: pedantic European scientists, who for years had been piling up in tons of numbers generated over the years by a prolific domestic delusional generator, and who built their most complex models on the basis of the behavior of a distant and mysterious Russian station, were simply shocked by such … lack of principle on the part of the leading world aerospace power.
In the photo: the trajectory of the flight of the station and the place of flooding
Unfortunately, it is not known what happened in the end with that brave major programmer who dared to tell the world the truth. The ITAR-TASS journalists who investigated the incident say that in response to the incident, waves of repression swept through the department where the poor programmer worked.
In the photo: the emblem of the Mir orbital station
Already, the military does not let anyone get away with such self-righteousness of their subordinates: and, since a small number of young people fled, having unanimously resigned “of their own free will,” several hundred remaining servicemen of the Yu. A. Gagarin, it was announced that the size of their current or future pensions will be revised downward. This was especially true of the employees of the department of military-applied subjects, where the brave programmer who rebelled against the system worked.