New Crew Will Repair Mir in August, Russians Decide

Officials here decided Monday to let the damaged Mir space station limp along for another month with a gash in its side and only half its usual solar power, rather than let its current accident-plagued crew try to mend it.

“It was decided to hand over the repairs to the next crew,” mission medical director Igor Goncharov said after a 2 1/2-hour meeting of top officials at Mission Control Center. The risky repairs, planned for this week, were put off until August.

Russian officials had suggested over the weekend that the delay was likely.

Commander Vasily Tsibliyev, who recently suffered heart palpitations, and flight engineer Alexander Lazutkin will return to Earth on Aug. 14, two weeks early. Their overlap with the two-man relief team, Anatoly Solovev and Pavel Vinogradov, has been cut from 20 days to seven. French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, who was to arrive with the new crew, now will not travel to Mir until next year.

Current Mir crewman Michael Foale, a NASA physicist, also will be dropped from the new repair team. Foale will sit out his appointed time in space before flying home aboard a NASA space shuttle that is scheduled to dock with Mir on Sept. 20. Despite worries raised in Congress about the safety of the space station, he will be replaced by another U.S. astronaut, Navy Cmdr. Wendy Lawrence.

Mir has lurched from one near-catastrophe to another since Tsibliyev and Lazutkin began work there early this year.

The worst accident on the station came June 25, when a cargo craft rammed the station’s Spektr laboratory module as cosmonauts practiced docking, puncturing the module’s skin. Sealing off the leaking Spektr from the rest of Mir, cosmonauts halved the aging station’s electrical supply by cutting vital power cables.

The cables now have to be reconnected, a process that will require at least two risky spacewalks and iron nerves.

But the jinx has continued. First Tsibliyev was diagnosed with stress-related heart palpitations. Then on Thursday, one of the tired, strained crewmen accidentally pulled out a cable and briefly switched off Mir’s on-board computer, heating, light and navigation systems. He has not been named.

The new crew will enter the depressurized Spektr module in spacesuits about Aug. 18-20, an “internal spacewalk” during which they will wire cables from the main portion of the space station to Spektr’s disconnected solar panels.

They plan a spacewalk outside the station in late August or early September to inspect the hole and work out how to mend it.

Russian mission director Vladimir Solovev said he believes the 11-year-old Mir station, which was designed to be used for only five years, could function “perhaps till the year 2000, perhaps longer. . . . The last blow shows that its body is quite strong enough.”

On Mir, Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were told to begin special exercises, take pills and wear high-pressure suits to prepare them to return to Earth’s gravity after six months of weightlessness. The mission doctor said Tsibliyev’s heart function is back to normal.