Mir's Last Stand?
Mir Prepares for Last Commander
Mir Prepares for Last Commander
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV=
Associated Press Writer=
STAR CITY, Russia (AP) _ The next mission to Russia's
Mir space
station could be the last, and the aging outpost may finally
come down in August, a crew commander said Friday.
Viktor Afanasyev, 50, who will lead the crew due to
blast off
Feb. 20 for the station, still hopes he won't be the one to bid
farewell to the beloved Mir, the pride of Russia's space program
for 13 years.
''We hope that we will have a replacement,'' he said
at a news
conference at Star City, the cosmonauts' training center north
of Moscow.
Afsanayev's crew ends its mission on Mir on Aug. 23.
After they
leave, if no money is found to finance a replacement crew,
Mission Control will fire the engines on Mir's cargo ship to
send the station plummeting into the ocean.
Afanasyev, a Mir veteran with 357 days logged in two
stints on
the station, blasts off for Mir from the Baikonur cosmodrome in
Kazakstan with French astronaut Jean-Pierre Heignere and Slovak
Ivan Bella.
After an eight-day stay, Bella will return to Earth
with the
Mir's current commander, Gennady Padalka. Padalka's crew-mate,
Sergei Avdeyev, will stay aboard with Afanasyev and Heignere
through Aug. 23.
NASA has long urged Russia to forgo the Mir and commit
its
meager resources to the international space station, a 16-nation
project that is a year behind schedule because of Russia's
failure to build a key segment on time.
The government had planned to discard Mir in June, but
the
station was given three more years of life when a private
sponsor was reportedly found to pay for its operation, rather
than the cash-strapped government.
Russia's space chief Yuri Koptev, however, said
Thursday that
the mysterious investor so far had failed to come up with money.
The station has been running relatively trouble-free
since a
string of breakdowns and accidents in 1997 that culminated in a
near fatal collision with a cargo ship and led many to compare
Mir to a rusting jalopy.
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