New Russian-French Crew on Mir; Astronaut Returns

A Soyuz spacecraft docked Saturday with the Mir space station, carrying a fresh Russian-French crew, while astronaut David Wolf returned to Earth on space shuttle Endeavour after four long, lonely months aboard Mir.

The docking on automatic pilot appeared to go flawlessly and was 16 minutes ahead of schedule. Dockings have been a suspenseful time for the crews of Mir, which was badly damaged June 25 when a cargo ship smacked it during a practice docking on manual control.

Russian cosmonauts Talgat Musabayev and Nikolai Budarin and Frenchman Leopold Eyharts had lifted off Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. They entered Mir from Soyuz later Saturday night.

The new crew joined American astronaut Andrew Thomas, who arrived last weekend on Endeavour, replacing Wolf.

Thomas is the seventh and final American to live on Mir. He plans to stay on the station until a U.S. space shuttle takes him home in May.

At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Endeavour and its crew of seven landed on the concrete runway, right on time.

“Dave, welcome back from 128 days on orbit,” Mission Control said to Wolf as soon as the shuttle rolled to a safe stop.

Eager to talk, Wolf gave a blow-by-blow description of the hatch being opened. “Ah, I can smell the air from the Earth,” he said.

Wolf could smell something else once he climbed out of the shuttle and walked into the airport-style people mover: pizza, a small with pepperoni and mushrooms, just what he had ordered.

Although the 41-year-old Wolf had agreed to be carried off Endeavour on a stretcher, “he couldn’t be held back,” said David Leestma, director of NASA’s flight crew operations. Doctors prefer that astronauts returning from Mir remain horizontal as long as possible to slow the effects of gravity.

Like the other Americans to have lived on Mir, Wolf faces days of intensive medical tests and weeks of rehabilitation. His bones and muscles were weakened in weightlessness, and his immune system and sense of balance altered.

“Now more than ever, he belongs to the world and we all have to understand that,” his mother, Dottie Wolf, said. “When he sees what he’s coming back to, all the speaking engagements and different things, he’s going to be ready to go back up to Mir.”

On the Russian space station, the new crew is expected to work on at least two repair jobs that previous crews have been unable to fix.

Mir still has a leaky hatch door and one disabled module from the June collision. Neither repair is essential to keeping Mir in working condition, but Russian space officials would still like to see the jobs done.

Eyharts will work in orbit for three weeks before returning to Earth with cosmonauts Anatoly Solovev and Pavel Vinogradov.