Rhonda Foale made a deal with her daredevil husband long before either of them knew he'd be flying to Russia's ragged space station Mir: First tell me you're fine, then break the bad news.
It all goes back to the day Michael Foale crash-landed his plane.He and a fellow NASA astronaut were coming in for a landing at the Galveston, Texas, airport when the single engine failed. The Grumman Tiger four-seater belly-flopped into Galveston Bay and, luckily, did not overturn. The pilots were rescued by boaters.
Foale left this message for his wife on the answering machine: "Hello, I'm fine. But, um, we landed the plane in the water. But I'll be home soon."
That was it.
Rhonda Foale laughs as she recalls that day back in 1993.
"We always joked about that," she said, "that how if anything happened to him, `I'm fine, but this happened to me today.' "
So whenever a new problem crops up on Mir and her husband's safety is threatened, she remembers Galveston Bay. So does he.
Foale sent this soothing message to his wife of 10 years right after a cargo ship plowed into Mir on June 25, rupturing the station and reducing it to half-power: "This is like other things that have happened to me."
She understood.
"It's just like landing the plane in Galveston Bay," explained the cool-headed woman behind the cool-headed man.
Besides, she said, "I don't feel too nerve-racked because we expected lots of things would happen because lots of things happened" during the previous astronaut's Mir stint.
Rhonda Foale understands the perils of spaceflight better than most.
She worked for NASA for eight years as an engineer, specializing in the shuttle robot arm. She quit after their second child was born in September 1994 and accompanied her husband to the cosmonaut-training center in Star City, Russia, a year later. They returned to their Houston-area home just before space shuttle Atlantis flew him to Mir in May. The shuttle is supposed to return for him in late September.
Rhonda Foale misses him, as do their two children. But she realizes that spaceflight is his dream; he'd love nothing more than to fly to Mars. And both feel strongly that joint U.S.-Russian space efforts like this are essential.
"I just say my prayers, you know? All I can do is say my prayers," Rhonda Foale said in a phone interview last week. "I know the managers are doing a real good job, they're trying to keep those guys safe. And they've always got the Soyuz they can come down in."
Without a doubt, she says, her husband's positive attitude and winsome ways have helped him through the tough times on Mir, as they did in his grueling preparations for this, his fourth and by far longest spaceflight.
"The Russians are so proud of him," Rhonda Foale says. "That is really something for a Russian to accept you and say, `You're almost like us.' They gave him that compliment even when we were living over there."
The 40-year-old British-born astrophysicist and former underwater expedition diver has not complained since arriving on Mir, either publicly or in his weekly phone calls and twice-or-thrice-weekly computer letters to his wife.
"He's always in a great mood and joking around," said Rhonda Foale, 39, who's American-born. "He'll tell me about watching a movie on the Mir. He writes really neat notes about (commander) Anatoly, how impressed he was when Anatoly showed up.
"It was like the cavalry coming in, like John Wayne coming in to straighten things out."
Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov arrived at Mir on Aug. 7 to replace the weary Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin, who had been on board for six months.