Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.

And today we go back to June 1997 when astronauts on the mere space station face disaster after the worst collision in lived off of this space shuttle Atlantis maintaining America's constant presence in space.

This is a special mission for Michael Foll. He's flown three times before, but on this particular flight,

of course, he will be staying on board the Mir space station.

I ended up on the Mir space station in 1997.

Michael Foll was the British American astronaut with NASA.

He trained in Russia for over a year

to spend months on board the Russian space station Mir.

Well, my biggest ineptitude in school

was speaking foreign languages.

And so when I was told I was going to have to live

on the Mir space station and speak Russian

to two guys who did not speak any English. I just thought

it was a bit like being sent to boarding school.

Mea had been launched in 1986, part of a Russian space program that had pioneered prolonged human presence in space, an answer to

America's missions to the moon.

The impression you got when you opened up the hatch and went into Mere for the first time.

We're twofold.

One was the smell, a bit like an oily garage.

Maybe a little bit of must, because we did have mold it on the Mere.

The other impression is clutter.

From the ceiling, on the walls, on the floor floor and so as you go through you go basically it's like going into the esophagus of someone's throat.

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