The End of Mir?
Mir, Russia's overworked and underfinanced
space station, may be landing near you soon. Russian space
officials, desperately short on cash, admit that they
may have
to pull the plug (this time deliberately) on the
station as early
as this year. "If we don't get the funding soon," says
one of
Mir's handlers, "who knows when and how we'll have to
bring the station down?" Officials insist that there is
no cause
for alarm. "We can manage the initial descent," says
space-agency spokesman Anatoly Tkachyov, describing a
plan to drop the station gradually into descending
orbits. If its
interlocking modules successfully separate, the station
will
then tumble piece by piece to Earth; Moscow hopes that
whatever bits of the 120-ton space station don't burn
up in
free fall will quietly splash down.
It's not coincidental that the talk of pulling Mir from orbit comes just as NASA has wearied of cajoling Moscow to deliver its long-overdue piece of the $20 billion International Space Station. The builders, having received just $22 million of the $300 million pledged, have yet to finish the module that will serve as the astronauts' living quarters, causing consternation throughout the project. "We're not talking about assembling a Lego toy," gripes a NASA official, pointing out that the work the U.S. is undertaking must necessarily follow that done by Russia.
Mir is now far removed from the great ambitions that accompanied its 1986 launch -- being the Soviet Union's first step towards mounting permanent space colonies by the year 2000. If the collapse of communism hadn't intervened, leaving the Russian Space Agency in such a sorry financial state that it can't even afford to pay Kazakhstan for the rent of its launch site, it might very well have succeeded.
Whatever its ignominious end, Mir will be remembered for remaining a functioning orbital platform for more than 11 years. This makes it an unqualified success compared with Skylab. Long before it came tumbling back to Earth in the summer of 1979, Skylab was plagued by problems, beginning at launch, when its solar shade came loose, leaving the American station roasting at a balmy 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
