Even at the best of times life on the Mir space station has been far from idyllic. According to the British born American astronaut, Michael Foale, the living conditions are cramped, the food is awful and there are no women. But, he added, after a short time one gets used to it: "It's just like school".
Mr Foale and his Russian cosmonaut colleagues, Vasily Tsibiliev and Alexander Lazutkin, will shortly face their toughest examination when, after new equipment arrives in an unmanned craft, they will leave the station to repair the damage caused by last week's faulty docking.
The operation is expected to be the most difficult and dangerous carried out in space and will, when the time comes, hold the attention of the world every bit as firmly as today's transfer of authority in Hong Kong. It is difficult to imagine a more tense drama than three men attempting to save their lives and their spacecraft as an anxious world looks on.
In the meantime the men must wait. Special adapters for their space suits will be needed and a unique airtight door device, necessary for the safety of the operation, is being manufactured in Moscow. It could take ten days before the equipment arrives, a period in which the three men will be subjected to the most critical tension as they prepare for an operation on which their lives and, perhaps, the future of Russia's space programme may depend.
Experts are confident that the cosmonauts have the temperament and the ability to pass this grave test. As for Russia's programme, however, influential voices have been raised against further funding from the West. Such a decision might, in some cases, make commercial sense. However, it could also isolate Russia further from the West and intensify an incipient eastward looking process which has seen Moscow regard Beijing, rather than Brussels or Washington, as its partner of the future.
Fuelling this change in attitude is what Russians see as a collapse in their national prestige.
The Buran space shuttle, for example, no longer proudly plies the cosmos but serves as a theme restaurant in Moscow's Gorky Park. The army which played the major role in the winning of the second World War is now grossly underpaid and demoralised after bitter campaigns in Afghanistan and Chechnya, while the economy is under threat from criminals.
Russians and citizens of the other newly independent states, which once formed the Soviet Union, embraced the new world of individual freedoms and the market economy with an enthusiasm similar to that engendered by the idealism which existed in the early days of the Communist system.
Now they are becoming increasingly disappointed by the situation in which they find themselves. Any further loss of prestige can only cause further alien at ion in a country whose power may now be at its nadir but which, history has taught us, possesses the resilience to return to its eminent position.