Washington —
A
fter outliving communism and the Soviet Union, and helping to link the space program of the new Russian nation with that of the United States, the Mir space station met its end in the Pacific Ocean.
In November 2000, t
he Russian space agency decided
to deorbit the 15-year-old space station and instead turn its efforts to
the international space station
, an April 2005 Space.com article said.
“[Mir] was an outstanding experiment in longevity in space,” RoaldSagdeev, professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and former head of the Russian Space Institute, said in a March 10 phone interview.
Mir far surpassed its 5-year design life.
After conceding a manned Moon landing to the United States, the Soviet Union concentrated its space program on Earth-orbiting space stations, Howard McCurdy, chair of the American University School of Public Affairs, said in a March 10 interview.
Mir’s 20-ton core module launched Feb. 20, 1986, on a Proton rocket from the BaikonurCosmodrome
. Mir shared
similar design elements with its Salyut space station predecessor, including its core module and 360 kilograms of equipment brought aboard from the retired Salyut 7 space station by its first cosmonaut
crew, Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Soloviev, according to RussianSpaceWeb.com. But unlike the Salyut
stations, the Mir core contained six docking ports for additional modules.
The station was
completed
in April 1996.
By
the time
Mir
launched, the Soviet Union’s government had undergone
profound changes, including greater transparency, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The launch of the Mir core and its first crew of cosmonauts were shown on Soviet television, a first for the nation,
a March 2000 Space.com article said.
Mir was not envisioned as
an instrument of international cooperation, Sagdeev said. But Mir’s
role in international cooperation outlasted the Soviet Union
.
In the 1990s Mir was starting to show its age and with dwindling funds for the space program, the Russians reached out to the United States to keep it afloat, McCurdy said. U.S. astronauts were invited
aboard Mir to learn about the space station in exchange for transferring hardware to prolong its life, he said.
But the space station became increasingly more difficult to maintain. “It was the end,” Sagdeev said.
At the end of its life, Mir had developed so many problems that the crew spent about 95 percent of its time doing repairs, he said.
Even if Russia had the cash flow from oil then that
it has
now, Sagdeev said Mir still would have been deorbited.
Mir provided a concrete model for the international space station currently in orbit, McCurdy and Sagdeev said.
The United States had its own plans to build a U.S. space station –
dubbed
Space Station Freedom – but those plans
stalled.
A less ambitious, less costly solution, called Space Station Alpha, came about during the tenure of U.S. President Bill Clinton, McCurdy said.
But the visits by U.S. astronauts
to Mir during
the Clinton administration helped to build momentum for the program that eventually led to
the international space station,
Sagdeev said.
With Mir failing, the Russians asked the United States for permission to contribute to the international space station.
“The Russians essentially rescued the U.S. international space station,” McCurdy said.
The deal gave the United States a larger, more complex space station than it otherwise would have had under
Space Station Alpha
, and gave the Russians a cheaper way to continue the work they had been doing on Mir, McCurdy said.
Mir was the pinnacle achievement of the Soviet space program,
and helped pave the way for the international space station in its current form,
he
said.
