The Vestibyul was barely large enough to accommodate a supine human. At one end was a flange that mated with the forty-centimeter ring on a Luk. Having slithered feetfirst from the Luk into the Vestibyul, a cosmonaut had just enough wiggle room to get his feet aimed down the legs of the Orlan suit that was attached to the other end, its door hanging open. Before doing this, however, he would seal off the Luk by manually putting its diaphragm into position and bolting it into place with a ratchet wrench.
Having donned the Orlan, he could then activate a mechanism, built into the Vestibyul, that would close the suit’s door behind him. The small amount of residual air in the Vestibyul would hiss out into space and the cosmonaut would be free to depart. At the end of the workday, the whole procedure was reversed. Just like a suburban commuter sleeping in a split-level home with his car parked in the garage, the cosmonaut would enjoy a few hours of rest and relaxation floating around the confines of the Luk with his space suit docked at the end of the adjoining Vestibyul.
There were a number of catches.
? Luk, Vestibyul, and suit formed a closed system. The only way to escape from that system was to successfully don the suit, get the door closed, and spacewalk to an airlock. If anything went wrong that prevented donning the suit and closing the door, rescue was impossible, or at least spectacularly improbable. A perforated Luk, probably caused by a micrometeoroid, caused a fatality on the second day of the Scout program. After that, the Luk/Vestibyul systems were brought forward to huddle in the shelter of Amalthea. The asteroid wouldn’t stop all incoming rocks, but it would stop many.
? Since there was no practical way in or out of the system, the Scouts had to fly up from Baikonur in their space suits, preattached to their Vestibyuls and Luks. This was necessitated anyway by the fact that none of this equipment could be accommodated inside of a normal space capsule. So they had to fly up crammed, six at a time, into cargo carriers that were not rated for human use and that had no onboard life support. They were, therefore, living off their space suits’ internal supplies of air and power from shortly before launch until their arrival at ISS. This journey could not be accomplished in less than six hours and so supplemental air and power had to be delivered to the suits en route. The failure of systems responsible for doing that accounted for two fatalities in the first crew of six Scouts and one fatality in the second crew.
? The capabilities of the suits were being wildly overstretched by these new mission parameters, and of course the Luks didn’t really have significant life support systems of their own, so everything depended on umbilical lines that linked these contraptions to Zavod modules. Zavod was simply the Russian word for “factory.” This was another new device that had been cobbled together in two weeks from existing technology. As long as the Zavod was supplied with power, water, and a few consumables, it was supposed to keep a cosmonaut alive by scrubbing CO2 out of the air, collecting urine, and removing their body heat. The heat was gotten rid of by freezing water on a surface exposed to the vacuum and then letting it sublimate into space. Failures of Zavod modules accounted for four fatalities among the first three crews sent up. Two of these were caused by a bug in the software, subsequently fixed by a patch transmitted up from the ground. One was a leaky hose. The other was never explained, but the fatality was witnessed by Izzy’s crew, watching through windows and video feeds, and seemed to match the profile for hyperthermia. The cooling system had failed and the cosmonaut had lost consciousness and succumbed to heatstroke. After that, they had stopped using the jerry-built cooling systems that had shipped up with the Luks and simply used ziplock bags full of ice, delivered daily.
None of this even accounted for mishaps that occurred while the Scouts were actually working. A damaged umbilical nearly killed a Scout on A+0.35, and he was obliged to disconnect himself from his Zavod and execute a heroic and perilous move to the nearest airlock, where they got him inside the space station with less than a minute to spare.
Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.
So, of the first crew of six Scouts, two were dead on arrival and one was killed in the Luk failure the next day. Of the second crew, one was dead on arrival. All six of the third crew made it to Izzy alive. Of the fourteen total survivors, four died from Zavod failures, one disappeared, and one was forced to “retire” from being a Scout and confine his activities to Izzy because of equipment failure.