Like Soviets Who Launched It, Mir’s Time Has Come and Gone

“The ship, a fragment detached from the Earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet.”

--Joseph Conrad

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For 15 years, it has circled the world, silently keeping aloft the dream that humans will one day colonize the cosmos. Now, as the Mir space station drifts toward its demise tonight--a plummet in a blazing cascade over the southern Pacific Ocean--those who have built and flown the hulking marvel are mourning the passage of one of history’s valiant ships.

Launched by a country that no longer exists--the Soviet Union--Mir ends its life as the pride of Russia. As recently as this week, some lawmakers here were still pleading that it be saved.

Nevertheless, space officials here are adamant that it must die.

“My heart hurts when I think about sinking the station, the fruit of our years of effort, but reason and the numbers convince me that the orbiter should crash,” said Anatoly Nedaivoda, head of the office that designed the spacecraft.

Mir was orbiting 132 miles above Earth on Wednesday, the starting point for its descent, said mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin. Controllers were working to bring the craft into a stable position and allow its solar panels to soak up energy for the final maneuvers.

An unmanned cargo ship docked at the abandoned station is to fire its engines twice during consecutive orbits early Friday to lower the station farther. Several hours later, a final ignition of the cargo ship’s engines will deliver the coup de grace and the station will sink into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The station, at 135 tons, is easily the heaviest spacecraft to be brought down from orbit, and controllers say they will have no communications with it or control over its path once it breaks up in the atmosphere.

Most of the station will burn, but hundreds of pieces--some weighing as much as 1,500 pounds--are expected to fall into the South Pacific between Australia and Chile today about 10:30 p.m. PST. The total weight of the debris could be 27 tons, raining down over an elliptical swath of ocean 3,728 miles long and 124 miles wide.

When it arrives at the outer reaches of the atmosphere, Mir will be traveling at more than 1,500 mph. Just before impact, the parts that have not been vaporized will have slowed to between 100 and 150 mph.

Analysts Debate Real Legacy of the Craft

In the spacecraft’s waning days, its creators have been happier to dwell on its achievements than to contemplate its end.

“Mir has taught man how to survive in space for more than a year and how a human being changes while in space. Mir helped us conduct new experiments in microbiology. Mir helped us advance new know-how,” said Sergei A. Gorbunov, spokesman for the Russian Space Agency. “There is no doubt that mankind should be grateful.”

But U.S. analyst John Pike has a different perspective. He says Mir was never about science.

“I think that its singular contribution was as a bridge from Cold War competition to post-Cold-War cooperation,” he said.

“Years ago, the Soviet Union put up Mir and the Reagan administration decided to build space station Freedom. When the Clinton administration decided to engage Russia in 1993, about the first visible thing they did to signal they had a new policy . . . was to agree to cooperate on [a] space station.”

At that time, the countries began joint programs aboard Mir. And last year, they together built and occupied the first modules of its successor, the International Space Station, or ISS, unofficially called Alpha.

Earlier this month, Alpha got its first Russian commander, Yuri Usachev, overseeing a crew of two Americans, something unimaginable when Mir was built. Russian and U.S. space officials say they hope Alpha will last even longer than Mir and mark the start of continuous space habitation.

Sergei V. Avdeyev, the cosmonaut and Hero of Russia who aboard Mir logged the longest time in space of any human--748 days--said he agreed with the tough decision to bring Mir down. Its life might have been extended for one or two years, he said, but what would be the point? “Future missions would only become more and more difficult.”

Said cosmonaut Musa Manarov, among the first two Russians to endure a mission of longer than a year: “I see no reason why we should weep. Why should we care more about a piece of metal than people?”

But when it falls, Manarov said, “we may well recall the old times, and even have a drink or two.”

For many Russians, the end of Mir in effect signals the end of an era when they could claim preeminence in space exploration.

The Soviet Union sent up the first Sputnik satellite in 1957 and put the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit in 1961. For Russians, Mir was one of its last symbols of superpower status.

But the high cost of its operation--$200 million a year--combined with diminishing scientific and political returns have spelled its doom.

“The question is whether Russia is capable of servicing two space programs simultaneously,” said Leonid A. Gorshkov, an official of the Energiya Corp. space enterprise, which designed Mir. “It is simply impossible to keep sending cosmonauts and spaceships to both.”

As Manarov noted: “It is impossible to create something new if you keep clinging to the old.”

That feeling is not universally shared here. Asserting that Russia must not concede outer space to the United States, Russian parliamentary speaker Gennady N. Seleznyov tried unsuccessfully this month to persuade President Vladimir V. Putin to save Mir and order up a new station, Mir-2.

Russia Could Again Go It Alone in Space

James Oberg, a U.S. specialist on the Russian space program, said it is “delusional euphoria” to think that Mir’s demise marks the end of big, one-country space endeavors. He said it is conceivable that Russia might one day decide to start up its own space station program again, by building a new, smaller platform or even by taking back the components it has contributed to the ISS.

He warned that one should resist “nostalgia based on fantasy” when discussing Mir. He called the space station really “an expensive toy that took 10 years to figure out what to do with.”

What the Russians finally figured out, he said, was to use the program to get them into international commercial space activities. Russia took in $800 million last year on commercial satellite launches and sales of space-related hardware, he noted.

For Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-area policy group, the geopolitical aspect of Mir’s demise is the most important factor.

“Piloted spaceflight is about politics. It always has been and for the foreseeable future will continue to be,” he said. That Putin agreed to dump Mir and focus on the ISS is “wonderful news--in the sense that if you were to add up the pluses and minuses right now, space cooperation is about the only front in which Russia’s relations with America are generally positive.”

Mir’s core was launched into orbit in February 1986, and, like a child’s Erector set, it morphed into different shapes as time went on.

For most of its history, it operated flawlessly--circling the Earth with dogged reliability, like a Russian-made car that might break down but always can be repaired. (Mir would have racked up more than 2 billion miles on its odometer if it had one.) Forty-six spaceflights were made to it; the station became temporary home to 104 cosmonauts, astronauts and assorted visitors during a total of 86,220 manned orbits.

Its worst day was June 25, 1997. During a manual docking test of an unmanned Progress supply ship, Mir collided with a remote sensing module, causing a temporary loss of air pressure. Commander Vasily Tsibliyev, Flight Engineer Alexander Lazutkin, and U.S. astronaut Michael Foale quickly secured the module and began fixing the damage.

Although Russia has dismissed the chances of anyone being hurt by the Mir’s fall, the government took the precaution of acquiring a $200-million insurance policy against all contingencies.

Russia has the most experience in this. Since 1978, it has ditched 80 Progress spacecraft and five Salyut space stations in the same area where Mir will fall, with no reported detrimental results.

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Reentry Schedule

Russia mission control began sending computer commands to Mir on Wednesday that will prepare the station for its return to Earth. Controllers today will fire engines twice during two consecutive orbits, and then again to send the station plunging. Estimated PST times for the maneuvers and impact:

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4:33 p.m.: First burn, lasting 20 minutes

6:02 p.m.: Second burn, lasting 20 minutes

9:30 p.m.: Third burn, lasting 23 minutes

10:30 p.m.: Impact

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Track Mir on the Web:

* www.space.com.

* liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/temp/mir_loc.html