Beleaguered Mir Crewmen May Be Fined in Accident

Russian Space Agency officials cast blame Tuesday on two weary cosmonauts for a disastrous June accident on the Mir space station and hinted that they will be fined for mistakes that cost the space program millions of dollars.

A report by the special inquiry commission set up only two weeks ago said an investigation had determined “beyond any doubt” that former Mir commander Vasily Tsibliyev and flight engineer Alexander Lazutkin were culpable in the collision with an unmanned cargo ship that disabled the station’s Spektr research module and ruined months of experiments.

Tsibliyev and Lazutkin remain cloistered at the Star City cosmonaut base east of Moscow for rehabilitation after six problem-plagued months in space. But a senior space official confirmed that the two cosmonauts believe they are being made scapegoats for a deteriorating manned space program that reflects this country’s general decline.

“From the purely humane point of view, we feel sorry for the crew, but there is no getting away from the facts,” Valery Ryumin, the Russian coordinator of the Mir-NASA space program, told the Itar-Tass news agency.

Mission Control spokesman Vsevolod Latyshev noted there is precedent for fining cosmonauts deemed responsible for costly errors: It happened to Gennady Strekalov after his troubled 1995 flight aboard Mir. Russian space crews work under contract with the government and are paid on a per diem basis, with bonuses of up to $1,000 for particularly difficult maneuvers like dockings and spacewalks.

Although officials declined to specify what punishment might be meted out to the pair, one official at Mission Control observed that “Tsibliyev and Lazutkin may well have made their last trip into space.”

Shortly after the June 25 accident, which occurred while Tsibliyev was practicing a manual docking maneuver with the cargo craft, Mission Control sources disclosed suspicions that he had failed to take into account more than a ton of garbage that had been loaded onto the cargo drone.

Apparently as a result of the weight miscalculation, the supply capsule approached the docking port with excessive speed and careened into the hull of the Spektr module. The collision knocked out nearly half of the space station’s power-generating capacity.

Tsibliyev and Lazutkin returned to Earth on Aug. 14 and were immediately confronted with media accusations that they had bungled their mission. “A scapegoat can always be found,” Tsibliyev told journalists at a news conference two days later. “But tomorrow a similar problem may occur with another cargo capsule.”

Meanwhile, the current crewmen aboard Mir have been practicing for a spacewalk set for Saturday to find and possibly repair the damage to Spektr. Commander Anatoly Solovev and NASA astronaut Michael Foale are expected to don spacesuits and work outside the station for about five hours.