In Sign of Budget Crunch, Soviets Will Shut Space Lab

The Soviet Union’s three-year-old orbiting space station Mir will be evacuated at the end of this month and mothballed, Soviet authorities disclosed Tuesday amid indications that the Kremlin is sharply scaling back its ambitious space program.

Mission control has ordered the three cosmonauts aboard Mir to begin shutting down and putting into protective wrappings the station’s scientific, flight and control systems, according to the official Tass news agency. In addition, the scheduled April 19 launch of a three-man replacement crew has been canceled. Space officials were saying as recently as a month ago that the mission would proceed as planned.

“New tasks will be found for the Mir,” Radio Moscow said late Tuesday, implying in its announcement that the space station will remain unmanned for some time, although it was designed and placed in orbit as the centerpiece of the Soviet manned space program.

Plans to enlarge Mir with two new modules--one small factory for growing crystals in conditions of zero gravity and the other adding more scientific equipment to the space laboratory--have also been postponed.

These actions, so far not officially explained, may reflect the Kremlin’s determination to reduce its huge budget deficit, estimated at $160 billion this year, as well as a rising popular demand that the space program be cut so that more money and resources can be allocated to meeting consumer needs.

“We are tackling more problems in the Soviet Union, but it is equally true that we are not used to counting our expenses,” a science commentator in the government newspaper Izvestia wrote recently. “There is actually no system yet that would enable a quick transfer of space achievements to our economy on a commercial basis.”

According to U.S. space experts, the Soviet Union spends more than $30 billion a year on its combined military-civilian space program.

During parliamentary elections last month, the once-prestigious Soviet space program ranked close to the government’s bloated bureaucracy and its massive military spending as the most frequent targets for criticism.

“I am not saying we should abandon space research--just stretch it out,” said Boris N. Yeltsin, the radical populist who won 89% of the vote in Moscow for a seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies. Explaining what he felt could be cut to improve the availability of consumer goods, he added, “Mars, Venus, the stars will be there 10 years from (now), just as they are today.”

Another critical element, however, may be the failure of two Soviet probes launched toward Mars last July with the goal of landing on the Martian moon Phobos. The first was lost in October due to a ground controller’s error, and radio contact was lost with the second in late March.

Those setbacks have brought into the open a serious debate among Soviet scientists over the course the space program should take, and the Soviet press has suddenly been filled with critiques of the program from half a dozen points of view.

“Some time is needed to assess the results of the Mir program, to measure them against our goals and decide how to proceed, and we do not need to keep men in space for that,” one well-informed Soviet official commented. “But there already is agreement that we do not need to keep Mir manned all the time.”

The manned space program has been strongly criticized within the Soviet Academy of Sciences as expensive and less and less useful scientifically.

But manned missions have also had strong supporters, not only in the scientific community but also in the Soviet military.