Since then Mir has become an even lonelier place. Last June three crew members slithered through the docking tunnels into the cramped Soyuz getaway capsule and sealed the hatch for the last time. They left behind a desolate, forsaken hulk. Sometime in the next week or two, an engineer at Mission Control in Korolev, near Moscow, will push a button, causing a rocket engine to fire three short bursts. Then, according to plan, perhaps the most significant achievement in the history of space exploration,rivaled only by the Apollo moon program, will burn up in the atmosphere and rain down on the South Pacific as so much debris.
To many people outside Russia, that’s what Mir has been for years: so much debris. By appearances, that’s not far from the truth. Fifteen years of continuous operation, the longest run any spaceship has ever had, has left it battered and scarred. Priroda, one of several research modules that stick out like nodes of a Tinkertoy, is crumpled like a junkyard Ford. (A wayward supply ship struck it in 1997, puncturing its hull and almost killing the crew.) Over the years there have been fires and leaks, power failures and life-support malfunctions. Because the interior walls have never been properly scrubbed (a flaw of design, not hygiene), a biological slime of some sort exudes an odor of dirty socks or musty basement. “There’s old stuff floating around,” says Jerry Linenger, who had the misfortune of being onboard when a fire raged for 14 minutes in 1997. “Being there is like swimming through kelp beds. It’s like scuba diving. There is a module designated for astrophysics, but when you float in you realize it’s just being used to store garbage.”
In Linenger’s view, it’s time to bring Mir down. “You can’t be sentimental about technology,” he says. He’s not the only one who thinks so. For years NASA has been pressuring the Russians to ditch Mir so they can concentrate on contributing to the spanking new–and far more costly–International Space Station. Even Yuri Koptev, the head of the Russian Space Agency, has been lobbying for months to ditch the station. With a space budget about 20 times smaller than NASA’s, how can Russia possibly support two space stations? “We do not have the money to carry out restoration work on Mir,” he says.
But Mir doesn’t deserve a bad reputation. Long ago it outlived its original design life of three years. Most of its recent troubles stemmed from Russia’s lack of funds rather than from its technology or its age. That these snafus have been well covered in the press hasn’t helped Mir’s public image. It’s hard to remember, but when the Soviet Union launched Mir in 1986, it was an object of fierce national pride, and rightly so. It was the latest in a line of three military and seven civilian space stations, the high point in three decades of the Soviet space program. It was–and for the time being, still is–the largest structure ever to be assembled in orbit, a feat that called for unprecedented hours of manual labor in space’s vacuum. As an assembly project, it will take the ISS, with its main truss and big solar arrays planned for 2002, to surpass Mir.
Mir’s reputation in the West as an accident-prone station is especially unfair. Mir’s hardware has been extraordinarily robust. For 15 years Mir has withstood exposure to the sun’s unshielded rays, bitter cold and barrages of tiny meteorites. “The most amazing thing about Mir is that it is still up there,” says Jonathan McDowell, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. For the early part of its life Mir suffered the elements gracefully, but the collapse of Soviet-style space budgets began to take its toll in the middle 1990s. By the time Americans began pulling up in their shiny, technologically pristine space shuttle, Mir had had spotty routine maintenance for years. As will happen on any car that doesn’t get an oil change now and then, things began to go wrong. With American astronauts residing on the station and the American media paying close attention, Mir’s travails reached a comic pitch. Toward the end of the decade Russia even had trouble mustering its Progress ships to refuel the station. Several times Mir sank dangerously close to the upper atmosphere before a ship would arrive to boost its orbit. Somehow, money was found and a rocket always arrived in the nick of time. “The Russians have kept Mir going with what amounts to a Third World economy,” says Gregory Bennett, vice president of Bigelow Aerospace and a former ISS design engineer. “That’s an impressive accomplishment.”
Not having to pay their workers a decent Western wage certainly helped the Russians keep Mir going, but clever engineering and a pragmatic philosophy also played a big role. Russian designers have never had the luxury of using the best possible technology. This might make something like Mir seem clunky and outdated, especially compared with the latest billion-dollar NASA project, but it leads to big cost savings. Consider, for example, Mir’s pressure vessels–the units that house the crew. They are basically big tanks of heavy steel–far thicker and heavier than the advanced materials used in the pressure vessels built for NASA’s part of the ISS. Since they’re made with ordinary materials and technology, however, they cost much less to develop and build.
Being heavy, the vessels also cost more to launch: more fuel is required to lift them to low Earth orbit. But here again, Russia’s low-tech approach saves money. While the U.S. space industry is forever developing new and better booster rockets, Russia has been using the same Proton rockets since the 1960s. When the Russians need more, they simply build more of the same. They never have to retool factories or employ teams of engineers to develop prototypes or spend millions blowing new rockets up on the launch pad. So what if the pressure vessels are a tad heavy? Russian rockets are cheap. “The American way of doing things is, every gram is precious, so we’re going to launch the most sophisticated equipment, we’re going to use the most advanced, superthin titanium materials, and we’re going to make them to the precise tolerance that we need,” says McDowell. “The Russian approach is, we’ll build it out of steel, make it twice as heavy and just launch it on a bigger rocket.”
Hardware is the least of Mir’s legacy. When it comes to the human experience of coping with the vicissitudes of long spaceflights, Mir puts the Russians at the head of the class. Since 1978, cosmonauts have held all records for endurance (Valery Polyakov’s record of consecutive days in space stands at 438). That stands in marked contrast to NASA’s experience with the space shuttle, where a typical mission lasts a fortnight. Short flights are relatively easy to script down to the smallest detail. For each shuttle flight, NASA rehearses every motion ahead of time, which takes months of astronaut training. When you’re sending a cosmonaut to Mir for more than a year, who knows what will happen in that time? Choreographing every finger motion is impossible.
To cope with uncertainty, the Russians have developed a freewheeling, seat-of-the-pants space culture. To Western sensibilities, this way of working can appear reckless. “The Russians like to figure it out as they go,” says Bennett. “To my American-trained mind, it sounds like a really dangerous thing to do. But they haven’t killed anybody. It works, or they’re the luckiest people in the world.”
Over the years, this approach has served cosmonauts well, especially when things break down–as they inevitably do on long-duration flights, and as they eventually will on the ISS. When the Priroda vessel was struck and Mir began to lose pressure, the cosmonauts onboard responded quickly to identify the problem and improvised a procedure to make repairs. They showed the same sort of moxie when the station would lose power, or when arriving crew members would open the hatch and find the station frozen, the heating system broken. Once, when the station began drifting out of alignment so that its solar panels were no longer properly oriented toward the sun, the crew, in an unorthodox move, manually fired the attitude-adjustment rockets to put things right.
The Russians, of course, haven’t done nearly as well in space science. Despite the years cosmonauts have logged in space, they’ve managed to come back with precious little physiological data. This is due partly to the lack of medical facilities on Mir, partly to the attitude of cosmonauts. “We never did get much science out of Mir,” says Laurence Young, director of the Space Biomedical Institute, a NASA-funded group. “In terms of life sciences, they really got most of their measurements before and after flights.” The scientific method apparently favors the procedure-bound American approach to things.
When it comes to engineering and operations, however, the Mir experience has turned out to be crucial in the building and assembling of the ISS. Many of NASA’s key people on the ISS spent time on Mir in the late 1990s. And Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut stranded when the Soviet Union collapsed, is currently on the ISS as a member of its first crew. The Russian Zarya module, launched in July 2000, was the first component of the ISS, and the Zvezda service module acts as the ISS control center. Each module amounts to a somewhat improved version of Mir’s core module, right down to the heavy steel walls. (While Zvezda was being built in Moscow, engineers hung a sign on it that read: mir II.) And for the past few months, and until Houston takes over later this year, Moscow is even running most of the show from the ground.
For Russian cosmonauts, however, Mir doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves. Many of them are still smarting over NASA’s relentless lobbying to have the station brought down. Last year the quasi-private space firm Energiya, which operates Mir, was trying to persuade NASA to launch the first components of the ISS in an orbit that would have brought it close to Mir. If NASA had done so, perhaps some of the valuable equipment aboard Mir could have been ferried to the ISS. It was not to be. NASA, apparently determined to keep Russia captive to the ISS, delayed its launch long enough to place the two in separate orbits. Instead, Mir’s solar arrays, life-support system, pressure vessels and 13 tons of scientific equipment already in position in Earth orbit will soon crash and burn.
Vasily Tsibliyev, who commanded the Mir crew during the disastrous year of 1997, recognizes the need to let go of Mir and move on. “We’re not taking a step backwards by getting rid of Mir,” he says, “but it is still very sad. The fact that Mir flew not just five years, but 15 years, I consider to be one of the greatest technological accomplishments of the 20th century.”
