To: Michael Watkins who wrote (5775 ) 2/19/2001 7:43:21 PM From: Michael Watkins Read Replies (1) | Respond to Look out, its a bird, its a plane, no, its MIR! Duck!Such operations have been carried out only twice before. In 1979, the U.S. station SkyLab was sunk. It was thought that the station, raised to a high orbit, will be able to operate for almost 100 years, but it began to fall rapidly. NASA tried to sink the station in the ocean and almost succeeded , as most fragments fell in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, but about 1,000 pieces landed in a populated farming area in Western Australia. Luckily, no one was injured. "We were lucky with the Salyut," Yuri Koptev, general director of the Russian Aircraft and Space Agency (Rosaviakosmos), said.less lucky in 1978 when its military satellite lost control and fell in Canada. The Soviet government had to pay over six million U.S. dollars to Canada in compensation . But neither the two stations nor the satellite, each of which weighed several times less than the Mir, can compare with the upcoming operation. It will be an unprecedented endeavour in terms of technical complexity.
