With a crucial visit from the U.S. shuttle Atlantis less than a week away, the Mir space station was dealt another setback Monday when its main computer failed for the third time in three weeks.
NASA is scheduled to decide Tuesday whether to go ahead with plans to dock Atlantis with Mir and replace astronaut Michael Foale with a new American crew member. Though more of an inconvenience than a threat to the crew, the latest computer glitch gives Mir opponents added ammunition.
Vice President Al Gore, in Moscow for a series of talks with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, appeared Monday to back off a staunch commitment to Mir.
Calling it “a very old space station,” Gore made the point that Mir is only one aspect of Russian-American cooperation in space exploration.
Nonetheless, NASA is loathe to cut and run from Mir. Beyond Mir’s value as a unique training ground for the International Space Station now under construction, the partnership pays political dividends.
Sending another NASA representative to Mir, its supporters contend, would send Russia a message: As much as possible, partners keep their word–in politics, in business, in space.
At a congressional hearing last week in Washington, critics invoked the 1986 Challenger disaster and suggested that Mir be abandoned before a crew member is killed. The critics are concerned that Mir’s chronic problems have turned the 11-year-old craft into a high-risk, low-reward venture.
“My feeling is that it’s time to come home,” said a NASA official familiar with the Mir program. “I think fate is talking to us, but I don’t know whether we’re going to listen.”
If NASA cuts Mir loose, it would disappoint those who see the space station as more than an expensive science project.
“Piloted space flight has always been mainly about politics,” said John Pike, space policy director of the Federation of American Scientists. “For the last four or five years, it has been about the Cold War being over. We’re partners.”
NASA often sells its programs to the American public by extolling the practical results of space research–“the NASA version of history in which every modern convenience came out of Neil Armstrong’s backpack,” as Pike put it.
With much of the research NASA wants to conduct aboard Mir impossible, given the craft’s sickly state, another mission becomes harder to justify. Why should NASA risk astronaut David Wolf’s life, critics ask, just because the Russians insist on risking their cosmonauts?
For starters, say friends of Mir, there is the experience. They consider life on Mir a training ground for what astronauts will encounter aboard the $60 billion International Space Station, scheduled to be put in orbit in stages by 2003.
NASA and the Russians now know more about how to deal with an on-board fire, a hole in a module, a failure of the orientation system, the psychological strain on a crew, or any number of other dangers that Mir has confronted this year.
“Mir is a treasure that should not be wasted,” writes Harvey Wichman, director of the Aerospace Psychology Laboratory at Claremont McKenna College in California. “The lessons we learn from it now are the very lessons that will allow us, one day, to more safely explore farther out into the solar system.”
Beyond that are the political concerns. The dollars that Russia spends on Mir and space exploration in general could just as easily go toward restoring the nation’s nuclear might. The rocket scientists and engineers in Russia’s space program could just as easily be working on missiles for Russia, rogue nations or terrorist groups.
NASA also has a kind of sunshine effect on the Russians, even if Russian officials are not nearly as open as NASA would like.
At Mission Control in Korolyov, reporters monitor proceedings from a balcony overlooking the main floor. A veteran Russian journalist, making his first visit to Korolyov, was stunned.
“You can see everything they are doing, you can hear them. This should not be. This is too modern. I would keep the press out of here.”
