The Legacy of Mir: FALLING STAR.(Mir space station to be brought down)

People who have lived on the Mir space station say that things seem particularly three-dimensional up there. The main living quarters, about the size of a Greyhound bus, are decorated with carpeting on the floor and lights on the ceiling, but weightlessness belies these conventions. When you can sleep comfortably suspended upside down, the notion of floor or ceiling loses its meaning. A glance out the window reveals not merely a landscape, but an immense blue-white orb inexorably pulling the station toward a 250-mile-deep atmosphere. Sergei Krikalev found himself contemplating this lonely scene when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He had to postpone his return for six months while Russia and Ukraine bickered over his replacement.

Since then Mir has become an even lonelier place. Last June three crew members slithered through the docking tunnels into the cramped Soyuz getaway capsule and sealed the hatch for the last time. They left behind a desolate, forsaken hulk. Sometime in the next week or two, an engineer at Mission Control in Korolev, near Moscow, will push a button, causing a rocket engine to fire three short bursts. Then, according to plan, perhaps the most significant achievement in the history of space exploration,rivaled only by the Apollo moon program, will burn up in the atmosphere and rain down on the South Pacific as so much debris.

To many people outside Russia, that's what Mir has been for years: so much debris. By appearances, that's not far from the truth. Fifteen years of continuous operation, the longest run any spaceship has ever had, has left it battered and scarred. Priroda, one of several research modules that stick out like nodes of a Tinkertoy, is crumpled like a junkyard Ford. (A wayward supply ship struck it in 1997, puncturing its hull and almost killing the crew.) Over the years there have been fires and leaks, power failures and life-support malfunctions. Because the interior walls have never been properly scrubbed (a flaw of design, not hygiene), a biological slime of some sort exudes an odor of dirty socks or musty basement. "There's old stuff floating around," says Jerry Linenger, who had the misfortune of being onboard when a fire raged for 14 minutes in 1997. "Being there is like swimming through kelp beds. It's like scuba diving. There is a module designated for astrophysics, but when you float in you realize it's just being used to store garbage."

In Linenger's view, it's time to bring Mir down. "You can't be sentimental about technology," he says. He's not the only one who thinks so. For years NASA has been pressuring the Russians to ditch Mir so they can concentrate on contributing to the spanking new--and far more costly--International Space Station. Even Yuri Koptev, the head of the Russian Space Agency, has been lobbying for months to ditch the station. With a space budget about 20 times smaller than NASA's, how can Russia possibly support two space stations? "We do not have the money to carry out restoration work on Mir," he says.

But Mir doesn't deserve a bad reputation. Long ago it outlived its original design life of three years. Most of its recent troubles stemmed from Russia's lack of funds rather than from its technology or its age. That these snafus have been well covered in the press hasn't helped Mir's public image. It's hard to remember, but when the Soviet Union launched Mir in 1986, it was an object of fierce national pride, and rightly so. It was the latest in a line of three military and seven civilian space stations, the high point in three decades of the Soviet space program. It was--and for the time being, still is--the largest structure ever to be assembled in orbit, a feat that called for unprecedented hours of manual labor in space's vacuum. As an assembly project, it will take the ISS, with its main truss and big solar arrays planned for 2002, to surpass Mir.

Mir's reputation in the West as an accident-prone station is especially unfair. Mir's hardware has been extraordinarily robust. For 15 years Mir has withstood exposure to the sun's unshielded rays, bitter cold and barrages of tiny meteorites. "The most amazing thing about Mir is that it is still up there," says Jonathan McDowell, an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. For the early part of its life Mir suffered the elements gracefully, but the collapse of Soviet-style space budgets began to take its toll in the middle 1990s. By the time Americans began pulling up in their shiny, technologically pristine space shuttle, Mir had had spotty routine maintenance for years. As will happen on any car that doesn't get an oil change now and then, things began to go wrong. With American astronauts residing on the station and the American media paying close attention, Mir's travails reached a comic pitch. Toward the end of the decade Russia even had trouble mustering its Progress ships to refuel the station. Several times Mir sank dangerously close to the upper atmosphere before a ship would arrive to boost its orbit. Somehow, money was found and a rocket always arrived in the nick of time. "The Russians have kept Mir going with what amounts to a Third World economy," says Gregory Bennett, vice president of Bigelow Aerospace and a former ISS design engineer. "That's an impressive accomplishment."

Not having to pay their workers a decent Western wage certainly helped the Russians keep Mir going, but clever engineering and a pragmatic philosophy also played a big role. Russian designers have never had the luxury of using the best possible technology. This might make something like Mir seem clunky and outdated, especially compared with the latest billion-dollar NASA project, but it leads to big cost savings. Consider, for example, Mir's pressure vessels--the units that house the crew. They are basically ...