Mir’s Final Crew Bids Sad Farewell as 13-Year Orbit Nears Its Finale : Spaceflight: ‘With grief in our soul . . . we’re abandoning a piece of Russia,’ station commander says.

The last full-time crew undocked from Mir and glided toward Earth early Saturday, bidding farewell to the rust-stained, rattling, 13-year-old Russian space station in preparation for its abandonment next year.

Crew commander Viktor M. Afanasyev, cosmonaut Sergei V. Avdeyev and French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haignere climbed from Mir’s main module into a Soyuz escape capsule and heaved the hatch shut late Friday.

They took off for Earth at 1:17 a.m. Moscow time Saturday (2:17 p.m. PDT Friday), said Irina Manshilina, spokeswoman at Mission Control north of Moscow. They were to land in a deserted steppe in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.

Mission Control will soon switch off most of Mir’s systems, including the central computer that keeps the station’s solar panels facing the sun.

Next spring, Mir is scheduled to leave outer space, burning up in the atmosphere and scattering some remnants in the ocean.

It was a sad day for the Russian space program--a force that in its Soviet days put the first satellite in the cosmos, as well as the first man and the first woman. The Russian Space Agency now has no cash, no new projects that are entirely its own, and a somewhat dim view of the future.

“With grief in our soul . . . we’re abandoning a piece of Russia, abandoning something we constructed in space, and it’s unclear what we’ll build next,” Mir commander Afanasyev said in a televised communications session late Friday.

As a camera in the escape capsule televised the cosmonauts’ slow departure, it seemed an eternity since the exhilarating experience of its launch: Just before midnight Moscow time on Feb. 19, 1986, Alexander Sperin left his father’s birthday party early to help monitor the blastoff. They named it Mir, or “peace,” in a bit of Cold War irony.

Some dubbed it the beginning of a city in space. But Sperin, now a deputy flight controller at Russian Mission Control, remembers wondering: Can this thing really last three years in orbit, as its designers claim?

It could, and then some. It lasted 13 1/2 years, more than 77,000 loops around Earth, despite 1,600 breakdowns.

Now it will embark on a sad trajectory, a gradual descent that will see much of it sizzle into Earth’s atmosphere and the rest--ideally--splash into the Pacific Ocean early next year.

The sad thing isn’t the end of Mir itself. With age, it’s become a 130-ton junk heap, a few salvageable scientific experiments lodged in a mass of corroding aluminum and outdated technology.

The sense of loss, for Russians, is that this lemon of a space station is the last major brainchild of the Soviet space program, and its demise caps decades of often unrivaled cosmic navigation.

Humbled by the collapse of their economy, their military and their global clout, Russians have clung to Mir, blemishes and all. They’re terrified of seeing their space accomplishments fade into history too.

After Mir, Russia will concentrate its scarce space funds on the international space station, which is borrowing much from Mir’s experience but is unquestionably under U.S. command--and is already far behind schedule because of financing delays on the Russian-made modules.

The Russians also hope to capitalize on their skill in making reliable, inexpensive rockets to send up foreign commercial satellites to sustain their space industry.

But nothing can replace Mir.

“I don’t think we will devote ourselves as much to other projects, from the financial or the emotional point of view,” Sperin said.

James Oberg, a Houston-based independent consultant and author of books on the Russian space program, agreed: “They poured the Russian soul into the Mir, that capacity for incredible suffering and endurance.”

Mir lifted off from one of space travel’s holiest grounds: the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, then a Soviet republic.

From Baikonur the Soviets sent up the world’s first satellite, the first man in space, the first woman in space.

Mir was born just three weeks after the U.S. shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven passengers. Mir’s first cosmonauts carried pictures of the Challenger crew into orbit because they “wanted those seven brave astronauts to go to outer space.”

Later that year, Jane’s Spaceflight Directory wrote that the Soviet Union had taken an “almost frightening” 10-year lead over the United States in the space race.

Mir was indeed untouchable for its first few years. Then the country that conceived it started to unravel.

Shortages plagued the Soviet economy, and many citizens questioned generous space funding.

The station showed signs of wear. Insulation was peeling off in chunks. Electrical systems were spotty, and its computers were capricious.

Twelve days before cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was to return home from a four-month stint on Mir, Soviet hard-liners staged an unsuccessful coup in August 1991 that precipitated the union’s collapse. Krikalev was left in orbit an extra six months amid the turmoil.

When he returned in March 1992, his country no longer existed. His hometown of Leningrad had become St. Petersburg. His once-enviable salary left him below the poverty line.

“There were those who said I should have stayed on the Mir; things were better up there,” said Krikalev, who was the first Russian to fly on a NASA shuttle and is to be on the first crew of the international station.

Like just about every Russian, Krikalev is sad to see Mir go.

“It represents a lot for us. But we must start a new era,” he said.

Despite Mir’s ailments, no other space program has come close to matching its duration, and its crews’ experience with long-term effects of weightlessness has been crucial in preparing the international station.

Endurance has been Mir’s main--some say its only--major achievement.

Although it has been a laboratory for hundreds of scientific experiments, they have failed to bring the Russian people much benefit. U.S. missions have been much more efficient at translating space research to commercial use.

Russians who work with Mir smile sardonically when asked about its name, which Soviet officials said emphasized the peaceful nature of their space program. In fact, Russian and foreign observers now say the Soviets hoped--and the Americans feared--that Mir would have significant military uses.

But Oberg said that after some initial developments, such as advanced sensors and ground observation, those plans largely fizzled.

Politics, combined with the humiliating failure of other recent Russian space projects, helped keep Mir aloft. No Russian leader wanted to be associated with the end of Mir.

The momentum for bringing it down mounted in 1997, a year that saw a fire rage on Mir in February and a near-fatal collision with a cargo ship in June that punctured the station--the worst-ever space wreck.

Since NASA completed a program that put seven astronauts aboard Mir, the United States has been pressing Russia to abandon it in favor of the international station.

The new station’s first two pieces are in orbit, and a crucial Russian-built segment that will house the crew is scheduled for liftoff in November.

Some Mir specialists--who earn about 5,000 rubles a month, or $200--will move to a backup control room for the international station. Others will be laid off.

But Mir isn’t dead yet. And some Russian space officials are still hoping for a new injection of cash to send another crew.

But Sperin, a 30-year veteran of the space program, warns that once Mir starts lowering its orbit toward Earth now that the last crew has departed, it would be fruitless and possibly dangerous to try to reverse the process.

“We need to say goodbye.”

CREW BIDS FAREWELL

* U.S. astronauts who served aboard Mir are nostalgic as an era ends. A20