The space station Mir is the best thing to happen to planet Earth since Tang, and anyone who doesn’t know that should turn in his Federation credentials and cell phone.
As my hero, Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger, might say, I am madder than a Vulcan at an ear pincher’s club at all this bellyaching about the good-old, reliable space station Mir.
First, let’s remember that Mir has been up there in continuous use for almost 11 years — twice as long as it was designed to work, traveled millions of miles, endured countless human errors and has yet to lose a single occupant. Name me one Ford Taurus or even a Humvee that can make a claim close to that!
Let’s look at troubles the station has had lately: Last winter there was a fire, started because flammable materials were allowed too close to one of the “candles” used to produce oxygen for the station. Let’s have a show of hands — who has never put something they shouldn’t have near an open flame? I have a hole in my car seat because I was careless in my handling of a — never mind my mistakes, let’s just admit we’ve all done it.
Moving on to the big problem that has everybody’s space knickers in an orbital twist: is it Mir’s fault that a guy having heart problems drove a four-ton cargo vessel into the side of the science lab? Is it a failure of Mir that made a tired, stressed-out cosmonaut cut the cable to its main computer, causing the station to tumble through space like a ballerina on valium?
The problem with the Mir is that human beings are running it. Were HAL, the computer from the movie “2001,” in charge up there he would have shut off life support and eliminated these error-prone grandchildren of monkeys years ago. But not only do we mess things up, we blame the victim — Mir.
Mir is not merely the victim of our blunders but the savior as well. No matter what we’ve done to it, the Mir has kept the sons and daughters secure, protected from cosmic rays, asteroids and space junk, and, as Jesse Jackson might say, it has kept interplanetary hope alive.
Seriously, we must develop more realistic expectations about what it means to be a space-faring race. Real life in space is going to look less like Deep Space Nine and more like the Simpsons in zero gravity. As the great Romulin philosopher Kiri Kin Tom once said: “The most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”
The bollixes, breakdowns and stellar comedies of error are what life in space is, should and will always be about. Breakdowns that endanger various Mir missions are not of the hardware or software but the wetware — the mushy, unreliable wiring and codes contained within our skulls.
We will, however, survive, despite ourselves and our foibles, as long as we keep making ’em like that dingy, but durable, orbital workhorse, the mangy, but magnificent, Mir.
