A few ordinary Russian birches were especially great, it’s a pity they were small. There were 3 or 4 oaks and about five green conifers… So crew members rarely called this compartment a biological one.
Somebody called it a forest, somebody a winter garden, a jungle, or jokingly a vegetable garden. All crew members often gathered here and started to fool about – play hide-and-seek or shout: Hello! I am lost! Sergey, the crew commander, pretended to be a mushroom gatherer and looked for mushrooms, flying between the shelves… and he found them!
Surely, they did not grow on partitions or the conditional floor. These were ordinary mushrooms from the Earth that were very similar to pleurotus that earth dwellers grew in their kitchens and balconies. And you had to look for them because Svetka often took them to different shelves – mushrooms grew faster than anything else and were eaten just as quickly… You had to eat anything that grew, and mushrooms alone were not sufficient!
By the start of the MS 88 project, the ordinary “Molnia” had been traveling to space for almost thirty years.
It was called so because it main task was to put “Molnia” communication satellites into orbit.
The rocket turned out to be reliable and even lucky. It was used to launch automatic interplanetary stations to the Moon and Venus, and also Mars which was much farther.
“Luna – 9”, the first space vehicle that made a non-destructive landing on the surface of the Earth’s satellite, was also delivered there with the help of the “Molnia” carrier rocket, but with an “M” index meaning “modernized”.
8К78М delivered five automatic interplanetary stations to Venus alone. The carrier had an almost 100 % reliability ratio, that’s why it was taken as a basis for the project of a manned flight to Mars.
By the time the project was at its final stage, it just had the recognizable appearance left from the usual “Molnia-M”. Inside, the rocket was more similar to “Mir” space station, and only two stages were left of the standard four.
Time in space, like on earth, goes at different speeds. Sometimes a month flies past like several days, and sometimes one day lasts like eternity!
It is the TIME becomes a threat and a difficulty, just like everything around in the open space. “Solar wind” calms down or strengthens, sometimes it practically disappears… meteorites flash past far or very near, and the “bravest” of these burn in the magnetic field of the spaceship.
This two-hundred-meter magnetic field around MS 88 burned almost completely the dangerous impact of cosmic radiation that penetrated through anything, and besides – high-energy particles of such a set of cosmic radiations that were fortunately not even dreamed of on Earth.
And time does not burn, it is not near and not far – it is always close to you and there is no protection from it! At least, for the time being…
The first month of flight was the fastest and the easiest. While settling in on the spaceship, we got used to it working, not standing in the integration house or training center. And everyday experiments and research were carried out as usual during this period of adaptation on board, so time passed unnoticed.
Everyday duties in space were now performed in the automatic, somewhat background mode. Having come to terms with practically the whole spaceship, now the crew had much more time to pay to themselves in general and everyone separately.
