SCIENCE: Russia Space Glory Gone with Downing of Mir

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Blagov.

MOSCOW, Mar 24 2001 (IPS) - When Russia’s space station, the Mir, crashed into the Pacific Friday, just as predicted by scientists, the successful operation did not elicit cheers of triumph from mission control centre. For the Mir’s downing symbolised the end of Russia’s glory days as a power in outerspace.

The Mir, which means both ‘peace’ and ‘world’ in Russian was the pride of Russian space technology. The station was launched in 1986 and was originally expected to be used for only five years as a research laboratory. But after countless experiments and numerous repairs Russian scientists decided to decommission the Mir and return it to Earth, which they did Friday in a fiery blaze.

The day of Mir’s demise is a day of mourning for Russia, said Guennady Seleznyov, chairman of the Russian State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament.

During the Soviet era, the space programme was the country’s showcase. The former Soviet Union spent an estimated 4 billion dollars to launch, upgrade and maintain Mir. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse in 1991, the space programme has become an unaffordable liability for Russia. Many projects, notably the Buran space shuttle project, have been shut down.

The remaining Russian space projects have been plagued by acute under-funding. These days workers at once elite space plants earn about 30 US dollars a month, though some Russian space executives earn 1,000 times this salary.

Mir crashed into the Pacific carrying some half a million dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art scientific equipment some of which had another eight to 10 years of useful service. The space station was valued at between 1.5 and 3 billion dollars.

Not everyone in Russia was willing to give up the jewel in the country’s space programme. Some officials and leftist politicians argued it would be a tragic waste to give it up and even talked about raising private domestic contributions to keep Mir in orbit. But that idea bore no fruit.

In 1999 there was even talk about an alleged deal to lease the space station to China, because two Chinese pilots went through a full course of training at the Russian space centre. That was followed by talk about leasing Mir to Iran.

But with an estimated 200-250 million dollars needed to keep Mir in orbit, it proved to be a really hard sell to find a private investor to put that money into the ageing space station.

Most recently, the Russian rocket manufacturer RKK Energiya, which owns the geing craft, had put forward a scheme to fund Mir by sending space tourists into orbit. Energiya planned to charge 20 million dollars to space tourists, or “citizen explorers”, for a weeklong space trip.

But authorities in the space programme said there was no point in hanging on to a craft whose crews had been spending 80 percent of their time on repairs in recent yearsá – notably after Mir had a near-fatal collision with a re-supply ship.

Russia’s principal partner in space exploration, the US space agency NASA, has long supported the decision to shut down Mir a move it believes will allow Moscow to focus its efforts on the new International Space Station.

Russia had decided to retire Mir in 1998, then in 1999, but the actual ditching was subject to countless delays. But on Friday, the 130-ton craft, the longest-serving space station in history, went down roughly 1,500- 2,000 kilometres off Australia.

The controlled descent cost Russia nearly 30 million dollars and the country took out a 200 million dollar insurance policy and prepared voluminous contingency plans in case things went awry.

Nothing did, and the Mir’s engines were fired three times to force it into a controlled descent. The space craft landed exactly where scientists had hoped, away from shipping lanes and populated areas.

But if the fall of the Mir means the end of Russia’s solo space programme, it hails the dawn of unprecedented co-operation in the space arena. The country is heavily involved in the International Space Station programme.

Two years ago Russia launched human civilisation’s most grandiose and most expensive exploration project ever, when it successfully fired the first component of the 40 billion dollar International Space Station into orbit. The Russian-built Zarya, or Dawn, module has been orbiting Earth smoothly.