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 Microgravity at night. Ryumin noted in his diary on August 16 that every night before going to sleep the crew activated the Kristall or Splav-01 materials processing furnaces. This was done to reduce the level of disturbance caused by crew movements around the station, improving its microgravity conditions for materials processing. Ryumin also commented that Splav and Kristall could not be used at the same time, because they each placed a heavy load on the Salyut 6 power supply. Previous expeditions had operated the furnaces for a maximum of 10-12 hr at a time, but for Salyut 6 Principal Expedition 4, longer melts, of 120 hr and 60 hr, were carried out. The products of these melts were large crystals. 62

Fuel conservation and problems with showers. On September 10 Ryumin wrote in his diary that the experiments requiring that Salyut 6 be maneuvered at a cost in fuel were complete, so the station was in a gravity-gradient stabilization mode at least until the next Progress arrived. In this mode it pointed the aft end of the Soyuz 37 spacecraft toward the Earth. This made Earth observations convenient, as most of the windows not blocked by equipment were located in the transfer compartment and pointed toward Earth. Ryumin also noted that he and Lyakhov had decided to postpone their monthly shower. “When you begin to think of all the preparatory operations you have to do, and then how many post-shower operations you have to perform, the desire to take a shower diminishes. You have to heat the water, in batches, no less. You have to get the shower chamber, set up the water collectors, attach the vacuum cleaner. . . it takes nearly the entire day just for that shower,” he complained.
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