Deciding Mir’s Fate
M O S C O W, Oct. 25 -- The Russian government is due todecide in the next few weeks whether to go ahead with a plan toscuttle the Mir space station, a spokesman for the Russian spaceagency said today.
Senior government ministers have said they favor bringingthe 14-year-old station out of orbit and letting it crash in theocean, but space officials have avoided taking a public stand onthe fate of what was once the pride of Soviet science.
“Roughly in the next two to three weeks, the government willmake a decision,” Rosaviakosmos spokesman Sergei Gorbunov toldReuters. “The space agency has prepared documents about thecondition of the Mir station and passed them to the government.”
Comments Suggest Ditching
Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov was quoted earlier thisweek as saying the station would probably be ditched in thePacific Ocean in February.
Russia is focusing its limited resources on theInternational Space Station (ISS), for which it has built twomodules. The first long-term expedition to the ISS is due to belaunched from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakstan nextTuesday.
Gorbunov said the space agency would play no role in thedecision on Mir. It was merely informing the government of thestate of the craft, which has been losing altitude, and theemptiness of state coffers, he said.
“There is no state financing [for Mir],” he said, addingthat he thought a group of Western investors was unlikely torescue the craft.
Investors Fighting to Keep Station
The investors, MirCorp, have bought the rights to selltickets to the public to fly on the space station. “MirCorpunfortunately won’t find the money,” Gorbunov said. “The mostthey can come up with is about $40 million and we need$200 million to $250 million.”
MirCorp has nonetheless remained bullish about its prospectsand one of its clients, the U.S. television network NBC, said onTuesday it was pressing ahead with a plan to put a member of thepublic in space in a program called Destination MIR.
Popular Reads
ABC News Live