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Russia to dump Mir space station |
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November 17, 2000
MOSCOW--(UNB/AP) - The 14-year-old Mir space station will be ditched in February in a controlled descent that will send it hurtling into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean, Russia's Cabinet decided Thursday. "Nothing can last for eternity, even the Mir," Russian space agency chief Yuri Koptev told reporters, warning that it would be unsafe to keep the rattling, corroding Mir aloft in its current state. The decision came after months of wrestling over what to do with the Mir, which Moscow can no longer afford to maintain. The Mir was once a symbol of Soviet space glory and is by far history's longest-serving space station, and Russians have been reluctant to let it go. The Cabinet approved a plan to crash the Mir into the Pacific 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers (900 to 1,200 miles) east of Australia on Feb. 27-28, after private investors failed to fund it, Koptev said. Officials said Russia should concentrate its funds on the international space station instead of the Mir - something the U.S. space agency NASA has been urging for years. NASA is leading the 16-nation international project, which had suffered repeated delays because of Russian funding woes. To keep the Mir aloft would require tests and procedures ensuring it is fit to orbit - which have not been done, Koptev said. "Any of Mir's systems may now fail," he said. The Russian government had decided to abandon the Mir earlier this year, but extended its lifetime after the private Netherlands-based MirCorp leased time on Mir and promised to pay for its operation. While MirCorp financed a mission to Mir earlier this year, it has failed to meet other commitments, forcing the government to divert funds allocated to the new international station to maintain the Mir, Koptev said. "We cannot continue this game ... which I call Russian roulette. We simply don't have the right to do that, because we are a government agency responsible for the safety of the Mir," he said. MirCorp representatives couldn't be immediately reached for comment. American businessman Dennis Tito, who had hoped to travel to the Mir as a "space tourist" under a deal with MirCorp and has already spent dlrs 1 million in training, will not be sent to the station, Koptev said. The Mir was hailed as revolutionary when it went up in 1986, and has far outlasted the three to five years it was expected to live. But critics say it has also outlived its usefulness. Abandoning the Mir was an excruciating decision for the Russian space program, a force that put the first satellite in the cosmos, as well as the first man and first woman - and now has no cash and no new projects entirely its own. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Thursday's Cabinet meeting that he considers safely discarding the Mir an international commitment undertaken by the Russian government. In calling for careful preparation for deorbiting the Mir, Koptev on Wednesday recalled a Soviet satellite that crashed into northern Canada in 1978. Nobody was hurt but radioactive fragments were scattered over the wilderness. The unoccupied U.S. Skylab space station fell to Earth in 1979 when its orbit deteriorated faster than anticipated, scattering debris over western Australia. No one was hurt. Koptev said an unmanned cargo ship would be sent to Mir in January and in February the cargo ship would fire its rockets to push the station quickly into the atmosphere. In case something goes awry, a crew of two Russian cosmonauts will be on hand to blast to the station and prepare its descent. The Mir cluster of six modules, bristling with solar panels and antennas, has far outlived engineers' original expectations. The inside is scarred by a 1997 fire and one module, Spektr, is sealed off after a collision that year with a small craft ferrying away the station's garbage. |