Michael Foale still remembers the Mir crisis as a moment where the margin for error went from “tight” to “gone.” He says the decompression incident created a lethal countdown, and that with only 23 minutes of oxygen left, Foale and cosmonauts Vasily Tsibliev and Alexander “Sasha” Lazutkin repaired the damage and stopped the station from tumbling wildly out of control. That is the core claim at the heart of PBS’ new miniseries episode “The Russian Thing,” airing July 21, 2026, at 9:00 p.m. ET, with the next chapters coming July 28 and Aug. 4.

In a new exclusive interview, Foale takes viewers back to May 25, 1997, when a manual docking maneuver caused an unmanned Progress cargo ship to collide with Mir. The impact ripped a large hole in the Russian space station’s Spektr module, setting off the life-threatening crisis that the crew had to physically and mentally fight their way out of. Foale also makes a second point that hits hard: he describes the leadership and incentives around the accident as the true accelerant, explaining that “the root cause of the accident was trying to save money,” including the decision not to pay for radar equipment costing $2 million in that timeframe.

If you want to understand why this story matters beyond space trivia, it is because it is a case study in how risk can be baked into operations by budget pressure and schedule urgency. Foale explains that the manual docking plan was longer than any cosmonaut or astronaut typically does a manual docking from, and it was executed without the radar. The radar, he says, was built in Ukraine and cost $2 million in that timeframe. He also lays out the chain: Energia corporation, which he calls the “guilty company,” decided that the crew should attempt a manual rendezvous and docking without the radar from about a six-kilometer starting point. And the test was not even in the cleanest conditions. Foale says they used a Progress spacecraft already filled with trash and meant to be de-orbited into the Pacific Ocean after a de-orbit step.

That is where the accident becomes both technical and painfully human. Foale says the test went wrong because Vasily Tsibliev could not determine the exact closing velocity in real time based on the measurements available in that situation. Foale breaks down the logic with plain math: you need the distance first, then you divide by time to get velocity. In his telling, “That was not possible in that situation and never attempted again.” The result was a collision with a much higher velocity than could be extinguished using the one thruster set that were turned on the Progress.

After the collision, the story shifts from impact to triage. Foale describes how the Progress bounced off after crumpling part of Spektr and bending one of the solar arrays. The joint cracked at the base of the solar array into the module, which is where the unseen hole was and where air was leaving. The crew later learned about the outcome only after asking what happened to the spacecraft. Foale says they were told that the engine was capable of being fired, that it was capable of reorienting itself, and that it de-orbited into the Pacific.

Then came the work to save the station. Foale explains that an adapter was sent up to connect power back from Spektr into the Mir system. He also describes how Vasily and Sasha were planned to do an internal spacewalk into Spektr module to reach cables that he and Sasha had disconnected to save the station. The plan was disrupted in a very human way. Because of the stress of the event, Vasily did not pass the medical test done before the spacewalk, including being wired for a heart monitor. A day later, Foale recounts a call from Valery Ryumin, the head of the program, asking whether Foale would be willing to go in instead of Vasily. Foale remembers he understood this would create a “huge issue” for Vasily and that Vasily “took all the blame of the collision on his shoulders,” which Foale says was unfair.

Foale’s reflections land on the second-order consequences that executives and boards should not ignore, especially when decisions are made under cost pressure or through tight chains of accountability. Foale retired in 2013 and says the lifestyle adjustment was difficult at first, including the “depressing moment” when he was told, “Oh, you’re done.” He also discusses the emotional reality of envy and career timing, saying he couldn’t survive the envy of younger colleagues who had flown once or twice. While this is personal, it is also institutional. In high-stakes systems, incentive design and operational decisions do not just change outcomes. They change careers, relationships, and how people carry responsibility after a near disaster.

Foale ends by talking about international collaboration in space, describing the show “Once Upon a Time in Space” as a kind of fairytale when he looks back. But his Mir account is the opposite of a fairytale. It is a reminder that in space, and in any regulated, mission-critical environment, the cost you try to save can be converted into risk you cannot fully model. If you lead programs where failure is catastrophic, this is the lesson: budgets and schedule tradeoffs do not float free of engineering. They turn into numbers like $2 million for radar, a six-kilometer starting point, and ultimately a crew racing a 23-minute oxygen countdown to keep a station alive.