pumped into a damaged engine thus risking damage or an explosion. The crew requested another attempt at an engine burn, but were denied and told to sleep. A recovery attempt could not be made for another day. Rukavishnikov could not sleep, however, and thought about the novel Marooned, which featured an American space crew stranded in orbit. It was only in 1983 that the Soviets revealed how serious the situation was. The craft had a backup engine but it was feared that it may have been damaged by the main engine, potentially leaving the crew stranded with five days of supplies while it would take ten days for the orbit to decay. One option to return the crew if the backup engine was inoperable would have been to use attitude control thrusters to slow the Soyuz below orbit velocity, but it was not known if there was enough propellant to do this, and the landing point would have been unpredictable even if it had worked. Another option was to move the station to the Soyuz. The station could have been moved to within 1,000 m of the craft, at which point Soyuz 33 could be docked using its thrusters, but the two craft were drifting apart at 28 meters per second, and time was needed to calculate the maneuvers. In any event, four crew on the station with one malfunctioning Soyuz and a second Soyuz (the station crew's Soyuz 32, already docked at Salyut 6) with a now-questionable engine (it had the same type as Soyuz 33) was not considered the best option. The main option was to fire the backup engine, but this option was not guaranteed to work, even if the engine fired. The nominal burn time was 188 seconds, and as long as the burn lasted more than 90 seconds, the crew could manually restart the engine to compensate. But this would mean an inaccurate landing. If the burn was less than 90 seconds, the crew could be stranded in orbit. A burn longer than 188 seconds could result in excessive G-loads on the crew during reentry. In the end, the backup engine did fire, though for 213 seconds, 25 seconds too long, resulting in the craft taking an unusually steep trajectory and the crew having to endure an acceleration of 10 gs. Rukavishnikov and Ivanov were safely recovered. It was the second ballistic entry reported by