During 15 years in orbit, Mir survived a fire, a collision with another spaceship and the fall of the Soviet Empire. Even after Russia’s economy collapsed, the country’s underpaid engineers managed to keep the station aloft. Then the Russian government signed a deal to build part of the International Space Station (ISS), a floating research platform assembled by 16 countries. That stretched Russia’s space budget even further. Last November Russian Space Agency officials announced they simply could not fund both projects. Mir had to go before it became a space hazard. At a press conference last month Yuri Koptev, director of the Russian Space Agency, defended the decision to angry cosmonauts and politicians: “We cannot play roulette with Mir,” he said.
Now on its last legs, Mir may seem like a rickety relic. One of its modules is dented, and the inside of the station is coated with a biological slime. But researchers say Mir has been an invaluable scientific resource. More than 100 astronauts from a dozen countries spent time on Mir. In thousands of experiments these pioneers studied crucial space problems, such as how to grow food, how to stay fit and how to work well with others in zero gravity. And NASA learned a lot from Mir about how to build a space station.
Space-policy experts say Mir is even more impressive because it was built on the cheap. NASA can afford to develop high-tech building blocks from advanced materials for the ISS. Russian engineers, on the other hand, saved money by constructing Mir from older, inexpensive materials such as steel and aluminum. Even so, Mir lived long beyond its original projected lifespan of three years.
Perhaps most important, however, Mir proved that humans can survive outside their home planet. Says James Oberg, a NASA veteran who is writing a book on the Russian-U.S. space alliance, “Mir showed that living in space is difficult, but we can do it.” That’s a lesson to remember as space travelers attempt ever more challenging journeys in the years to come.
