Hand-Driven Lifeline: How Salyut 7 Was Revived in Orbit
In 1985, the Soviet space station Salyut 7 went silent after an electrical cascade killed power and froze its systems; four months later, cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh manually docked with the dead station, entered with gas masks and flashlights, and revived it with improvised wiring and a reoriented solar array, restoring power and life support within weeks—an enduring milestone in in-space repair.