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Space

Mir on Death Row - No Clemency Expected 97

Posted by michael from the glub-glub dept.
angkor writes "The date has been set. Space.com has the news. Mir will plunge into the Pacific Ocean on March 6, 2001. Farewell old friend!" It looks final this time. Update: 01/13 03:32 PM by michael : I swear we won't post about Mir anymore until the pieces start raining down. :)
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Mir on Death Row - No Clemency Expected More

Mir on Death Row - No Clemency Expected

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  • Please (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try to really hit the ocean and not drop it on my head. Thanks.
  • Wouldn't the vast majority of it have disintegrated prior to reaching the ocean? I'm guessing you'll get to see a ball of fire way overhead, only to see it peter out of existance way before i'd ever hit the ocean...
  • If it survives reentry, it deserves to take over the world...

  • Don't worry about that. The extreme temperatures will most likely disenegrate the fungus.

    Unless it's a super fungi!
  • When it re-enters the first thing to go will be the solar panels, they have a huge surface area and aren't strongly attached so aerodynamic forces will quickly rip them off. Next the individual modules will probably seperate as the docking ports that connect them will be something of a weak link. Finally the modules will break apart as the frictional heating and aerodynamic loads peak (the graph of these values agains time for a re-entering body looks like a bell curve). What will survive will be things like heavily built electronic boxes and fuel and oxygen tanks. Spherical, titanium tanks are notoriously good at surviving re-entry, even when they aren't supposed to, Mir has quite a few of these mounted on the outside which will probably detach quite early on to land seperately.

    And of cource in the weeks following, we're bound to see a steady stream of people trying to eBay rusty bits of junk they dug up in their yard. Claiming that these are genuine Mir fragments.

  • *tries to think of something original to say about the death of MIR*

    *fails because it's been killed and resurrected roughly 1e6 times now*

    I sure do hope it doesn't hit MY house! A-hyuck!

    Cheers,
    levine
  • Well, this is almost like asking: "can we use those old Sun 3/50 parts in our new E10000 server?"
  • and you get a great sitcom about MIT dorm life. "Hey, everybody, let's hop on a rocket, blast off into the atmosphere, and GRAB Mir as it comes down! We'll all use our rockets and manuever this thing to the dorm! We can disassemble it and leave it in the professor's room as a joke! Hee hee!"
  • Actually it was up about 6 years the first
    space shuttle mission was supposed to go up
    and resupply it to keep it going
    but unfortunately the shuttle was behind scheduale

  • Or, if there's one last refueling robot flight headed up there -- maybe the refueling capsule could leave behind a camera pod on the outside of Mir...
  • Obligatory "end of the world" post

    "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning
    as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers, and upon the
    fountains of waters;
    "And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters
    became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
    bitter."

    END Obligatory "end of the world" post

    I think you're thinking of Chernobyl. (In Ukrainian, Chernobyl == Wormwood; in Russian, Mir == Peace or world)
  • I guess the heat when entering the atmosphere would burn every C based life form.
  • attitude is like the orientation of the ship.. normally (if you're flying a plane) it's in relation to the horizon (tilted to the right, left up, down, etc..).. i dunno wtf it would be in relation to in space.. sun maybe.. *shrug*
  • That's my 21st birthday. what a nice present from the russian space administration... :)

    --buddy
  • How much will actually make it to the water, vice burning up?

  • Sadly, neither does Clinton.

    Unless it means "how to get people to stop testifying against me."
  • Considering that we don't even have a real photo from a sattelite passing by pluto, it seems like mir is ahead of it's time.

    Apparently the world ecomomy thinks that there are far more important things han space exploration/colonization, like buying more rifles.

    ___________________________
    http://www.hyperpoem.net [hyperpoem.net]
  • NASA has been bugging the Russians forever to give up on Mir so that they could focus on the International Space Station (ISS). Although someone else posted plans for Mir2, which would be privately financed I think. Until the last year when the ISS began coming online there was just the Mir for space stations and it was in pretty bad shape. Now the Mir is being taken down, but the ISS is actually going to be fully operational soon so I think that is still progress.
  • We seem to be doing okay so far.

    What's that, the Russian Roulette theory? That's why (for example) people who have dared to drive drunk and not killed someone find it much easier to allow themselves to do it in the future. Same goes for many many bad decisions people make everyday.

    The argument "we did it this way before and nothing bad happened" is a compelling trap, and should be given little weight in decisions.

    I'm not trying to discount the value of experience here. What I'm saying is that if something seems dangerous, and you can come up with no better argument than "nothing bad's happened yet," then it's probably a good time to make sure your insurance is paid up.

  • ever heard of spacelab?

    Skylab.

  • I'd rather it kill some redneck fucking yanks than hit anything in australia. loser.

    Maybe it'll hit your shift key.

  • ...have a high altitude plane attempt to film any or all...

    It's going to be moving pretty damn fast.

  • Mir's gyrodines, used to control the station's attitude, will be turned off on Feb. 10...
    Note: i think they meant to say altitude not attitude in the story...

    So then you think they will be turning off the altitude?

  • How many of the un-identifiable, radiation-hardened, metal-digesting fungi/bacteria/organisms that have taken over the hull are actually going to survive their fiery plunge to earth?

    And what kind of ecological warfare are they going to be capable of given the comparatively unlimited resources available?
  • They should wait until that idiot that wants to spend $20 Million goes up there, then plunge it down. $20 million....
  • How about a moderation system for articles?
  • I have never seen any mention of this being done, but with the cost per pound of payload to ISS, would it have been possible to salvage some of the soon-to-be-drowned hardware and re-use it for one purpose or another on ISS? I'm sure it would be much cheaper to change the orbit of some parts (or simply tow them with a shuttle) to get them close to ISS. Yes, the thing is way old, but some of the stuff must still be useable, for materials if no other purpose.

    -DVK

  • But what if somehow it's orbit decayed and it got into an uncontrolable decent headed right for Tokyo? It is far safer to force something into earth at a tragectory(sp?) that will allow for maximum destruction over the right area of the world(in this case australia, erm i mean the pacific ocean.
  • I turn seventeen that day!
  • My birthday too! Thanks guys! This is quite possibly the coolest birthday gift I've received.
  • For those of you that live on that tiny island of [insert name of obscure island to be hit] in the Pacific Ocean, perhaps you should think about ordering some of those pillows that that guy on the Yahoo commercial did. They work wonders protecting poorly-built trailors from falling satellites.

    On a slightly more serious note (just slightly), what do we do if part of the satellite happens to fall onto some boater or an important buoy or pipe? (I don't know much about the global positioning of our bandwidth pipes, but wouldn't it be horrible if the transatlantic pipeline were cut in two? Just a thought. And it won't happen, so dismiss the thought from your mind. Now.

  • No, they meant "attitude". It's a term commonly used in aviation.
    • A position of the body or manner of carrying oneself: stood in a graceful attitude.
    • A state of mind or a feeling; disposition: an attitude of open hostility.
    • The orientation of an aircraft's axes relative to a reference line or plane, such as the horizon.
    • The orientation of a spacecraft relative to its direction of motion.
    • A position similar to an arabesque in which a ballet dancer stands on one leg with the other raised either in front or in back and bent at the knee.
  • I don't think anybody would suggest latching old parts of Mir onto the ISS or otherwise use Mir pieces in that manner. But, you gotta think that there's a lot of things that you take for granted on earth that the ISS could really use - things like a simple toolkit or such. Figure at about 5 pounds something even that small would cost many tons of thousands to launch into space. With a little machine work, miscellaneous pieces of metal from Mir could be used to patch up broken rods or such on the ISS. Possibilities are pretty endless, because you can never predict when something from mir might be highly useful for the ISS.
  • What is this, the 58th time we've heard that Mir is going down? I think I'll believe this when I see it it (and even then, I'll be somewhat skeptical, what with the computer special-effects they have these days).

  • I wonder what the possibility would be of getting in the vicinity of the splashdown to watch a first in a lifetime event? It would definitely be the coolest thing I've ever seen... Large glowing mass descending, hitting the ocean at ungodly speeds, causing the world's largest cannonball effect! What a rush...

    its all fun and games until someone loses and eye :)

    tdawg

  • I read on the web site that MIR was gonna do pickups of some of the satelittes.... IF it aint too expensive...why not see if they can preserve some of the satelites for pickup, and then REALLY see if they can do an analysis of the things
  • fuckin thintg....I was drunk as hell when I made thqat post.....hehehehehehehehehehe 4 double kamikazes....I should go to bed at this point......
  • Let's not forget how much other stuff has come down over the years with, most probably, very similar if not worse things on/in them. Our other space-craft if not just meteors and the like. We seem to be doing okay so far.
  • I wonder what the possibility would be of getting in the vicinity of the splashdown to watch a first in a lifetime event? It would definitely be the coolest thing I've ever seen... Large glowing mass descending, hitting the ocean at ungodly speeds, causing the world's largest cannonball effect! What a rush...
  • The fungus should get fried up during reentry.

    - Amon CMB

  • I am concerned over the recent fascination with death here on /. Look at these headlines, all of which appeared in the last 24 hours:

    • Mir on Death Row
    • SyncML 1.0 released; MAL is dead
    • William Hewlett Dead

    This is unhealthy. Maybe you should consider alternative, more PC and euphimistic phrasings?

    • Mir to bite the dust
    • SyncML 1.0 released; MAL has been obsoleted
    • William Hewlett moves on to greener pastures

    Then I can let my little toddlers read /. again.

  • Why reinvent the wheel every time you want to build a car? If you read through the ads in a software engineering magazine, you're bound to come across one that asks this question. It's the favorite cliche for people trying to sell libraries of reuseable software.

    When the first American astronauts arrived at the Mir space station, they were shocked to see what a bunch of pack rats the cosmonauts were. The cosmonauts pointed out how expensive it was to bring anything up from Earth, and said that their experience had shown that it was foolish to throw anything away, regardless of how marginal its value seemed. In the end the Russians convinced the Americans that they were right.

    Some biologists were surprised to discover that 98% (or something like that ) of the human genome are "junk". But imagine Mir after a few billion years of habitation. At current rates of accumulation, having 98% percent of the mass of the station being junk would not be surprising at all.

    Since space was short the cosmonauts probably threw out the stuff they really couldn't use. So a universal toolkit of trash was probably evolving. That would be very useful in the ISS. Gives garbage collection a whole new meaning

  • No, I believe there were several stretches of time when Mir was unmanned during the early 90's dur to budget problems that Russia was having after the fall of the "Iron Curtain." US contribution to the Russian space agency saved the Mir.
  • Mir's gyrodines, used to control the station's attitude, will be turned off on Feb. 10

    its not because its old, its because it has bad attitude!

    they dont make them like they used to!

    Note: i think they meant to say altitude not attitude in the story...

  • ok

    i admit it

    i was just trying to get moderated up for being funny

    didnt work obviously, instead i showed my ignorance

  • You know, I think that the TV folks who wanted to do an "Survivor" series involving a trip to MIR are missing a hell of a bet here. Just think... 12 people... one doomed space station... and all they have is this other zany ./ idea [slashdot.org] to keep them alive in the end. Will they fall in love? Will they burn up over Siberia?
    Heck, I'd even watch that one!
  • Russia could always sell it on eBay...right?
  • daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.......
  • Ahhh that's too bad. After the space diving article I was thinking it would be a good anchor for space bungee jumping ;
  • What if we (the linux community) all pay $20? Then we just need 1M people and we can stuff mir full with LinuxBoxes. That done we only need to find a use for it... (almost all cool things are useless...) (or useless things are cool... what ever you want)
  • Stop blaming NASA. It's the american public that is keeping NASA from getting shit done. Think about it. The Challenger explosion messed up NASA for almost 8 years. You think that would stop the Russians?

    When the Apollo astronauts entered the Soyuz in 1975 they were appalled at the state of the russian capsule and the lack of safety equipment.

    NASA has to deal with regulations hundreds of times more strict than the Russians.

    I'd say NASA did pretty damn well considering they had to deal with the Joe Q. Public, American, the biggest coward on the planet.

    ~y

    --
    j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
  • I'd say NASA did pretty damn well considering they had to deal with the Joe Q. Public, American, the biggest coward on the planet.

    except for the french :)
    --
    j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
  • It would not be good an idea, considering the energy needed to propel it away from earth's gravitational field. Why waste that much fuel for something that idle?
  • This is the eighth [slashdot.org] time Slashdot has reported that MIR will be decomissioned. Enough Already!
  • 21st birthday? I'd much rather enjoy a bottle of russian vodka ;-)

  • I swear we won't post about Mir anymore until the pieces start raining down. :)

    Do you promise?
    Cross your heart and hope to die?
    Stick a needle in your eye?
    Stab a dagger in your thigh?
    Eat a botulism pie?

    Well???

  • Although de-orbiting procedures are painstakingly exact, I'm still mystified by the way the article downplays the land-impact possibilities. While 3/4 of the earth may be water, the atmosphere is still a chaotic environment, and can causing inbound objects to do things you wouldn't quite expect. (Of course a helmet wouldn't help, I'd most likely be a rapidly expanding cloud of sticky red steam) OT:Never lost a wink of power in CA during the rolling blackouts....of course, the seawall near my apt collapsed.....
  • its all fun and games until someone loses and eye

    Then its just fun you can't see... :)
  • I cant believe it! The last know relic of the cold war is gone, and now comunism will die out only to be replaced by a worse evil, FUDAMENTALIST MUSLIMS!!!!!!
  • Speaking of the fungus on Mir, when it comes crashing on down on the ocean, one which happens to Australia's next door neighbour, you have to wonder how much of it is gonna hurtle on down on Aus? Australian News Services have showed movie clips of locals carting along trailer loads of Space Junk. when other man made objects have come raining down. If a fair amount lands with the fungus on it, do we have to worry about it spreading and/or becoming poisinous? irc addict. (Yes Im Australian)
  • reading the comments, it seems to me that the a few /.-ers are interested in space beyond star wars movies and most others just believe the usual 'predigested' hype of "experts".
    <BR>can't you see the obvious?
    <BR>-- MIR has to go, so that the PR focus is on ISS
    <BR>-- Keeping MIR in storage will not make much money for the aerospace industry
    <BR>-- Condemning MIR as old tech gives Americans {US'ians) the chummy feelinf of superiority
    <BR>
    <BR>Let's face it. Russian Space missions were always 'can-do' ventures, in which human readyness to self-sacrifice and improvisation as the superior form of trouble-shooting, beat the western 'safety through piles of cash' approach.
    <BR>Only when Kennedy realized this and instructed US developers to mimmick the 'Russian way', did the Americans gain ground and won the cardboard race to the Moon.
    <BR>
    <BR>Since then the West is back in it's safety nets and doing everything to stiffle Russia's space programs. Did you know that the West pratically pressed Russia into the ISS program?
    <BR>Russia would have preferred to go it's own way [with japanese financial backing being offered].
    <BR>But as NASA and the Pentagon realized that even ESA was starting to reconsider if a deal with Russia might be better than the ISS alternative, the muscle flexing started.
    <BR>Rumour has it that there were even threats to impose higher taxes on Eurotech imports if European governments didn't push ESA to fall back in line.
    <BR>
    <BR>To sum up, this whole, "go with us" approach is creating jobs in the US and ensures that NASA will decide who goes to Mars first.
    <BR>
    <BR>For the common good, we should have lobbied for MIR years ago and violently opposed billions of dollars to be wasted on a NASA pet project;
    <BR>MIR was practically up for sale and projections about adding modules to it and gradually replacing older components, which showed that the same tasks that ISS may or may not achieve [at three times the original planning budget with no end in sight] at less than 30% of the original ISS budget were supressed.
    <BR>
    <BR>Question:
    <BR>--------
    <BR>"If three inferior satellites at a cost of $8M each [incl. launch and deployment]can do the job of one superior satellite that costs $50M and has a higher risk margin , shouldn't we go with inferior technology until superior technology becomes cheaper?"
    <BR>
    <BR>Answer NASA:
    <BR>"No, superior technolgy is absolutely vital."
    <BR>
    <BR>Answer Common Sense:
    <BR>"Go with the most cost-effective alternative, especially if it permits time savings, and use the surplus funds for further research and technology improvements"
    <BR>
    <BR>Argument NASA:
    <BR>"Well, you know, it's not our money, really..."

  • oops (Score:1)

    by DiviN ( 246231 )
    where did the come from?
  • Nah, man, that thing is HUGE, there'll be some pretty big pices left, especially if it all deorbits in one piece, as it looks like it will if nobody goes up to close it out.

    There are electrical conduits and ventilation tubing going through ALL intermodule hatchways, so there would definately need to be a person prepping the ship for descent, a remote controller couldn't just pop modules off by themself.

    I'd sure like to see it happen...I wonder if any cruise lines would be interested? :)

    -A6
  • Second in a lifetime for some of us. Remember Skylab [nasa.gov] ?
  • No sweat... where will you be on March 6th? Be precise.
  • Personally, I think it's a pride thing for the Russians at this point. They just want to have uptime bragging rights because they think they have the best, rock-stable system, nevermind all the known vulnerabilities and bugs.
    /me ducks
  • We'd better all go to Yahoo.com and buy some pillows so we can catch the falling parts!

    (If you don't get this visit AdCritic and find the ad I'm referring to before modding this down. :))
  • This is really too bad. 100+ tons of equipment are basically being thrown away, and that's a damn shame.

    No, it's 100+ tons of junk. MIR is dead, it cannot be reused, reclaimed, or recycled. It's worn out and cannot be overhauled, upgraded, or repaired. It's *dead*. And all the wishing in the world won't change that.

    If US export restrictions hadn't stopped MirCorp from exporting the METS electrodynamic tether to Russia for launch to the Mir, Mir could have been put into a high storage orbit.

    Assuming the tether worked. (Don't forget, it's unproven, incompletely tested technology.) Even so, all it would have done is put off into the future the date that the problem would have to be dealt with.

    Using this, Mir could be at 400 or 500 miles up now, safe from danger of atmospheric drag and all at the cost of one Progress launch (METS fits on one Progress).

    *Could be*, if the tether worked..., if MIR's clapped out control system could hold together..., if the docking system worked (which the Russians have had problems with lately). Too many if's. (Not to mention *if* there was a rational reason for doing this in the first place..)
  • Figure at about 5 pounds something even that small would cost many tons of thousands to launch into space. With a little machine work, miscellaneous pieces of metal from Mir could be used to patch up broken rods or such on the ISS. Possibilities are pretty endless, because you can never predict when something from mir might be highly useful for the ISS.

    Not really. It's very difficult to get from ISS's orbit to MIR's orbit and vice versa. So you have to spend the money to build the orbital transfer vehicle, then risk an astronauts life on a dead and soon to be out of control MIR... Not to mention the need to boost a machine shop to ISS for the occasional chance you might need it...

    Sorry, but it's easier to simply boost the part you need.
  • When I see the TV pictures of the Russian Space Control Room, there are loads of banners of companies like Hewlett Packard and well I can't remember the others but what are they doing, sponsering a space station crash? It surely can't be good publicity ( "we helped Mir crash into the Pacific...")

    Smigs
  • Wouldn't something that big hitting the water create a tidal wave? Could this be Russia's attempt to finally end the cold war?
  • Reading that article, I was reminded of reading about the procedure involved with giving a lethal injection to a death row inmate. Almost makes it sound like an execution.

    -Restil
  • Previous slashdot articles:

    MirCorp dumps Mir station [slashdot.org] by michael on Tue Dec 12, '00 12:17 PM MST 34

    At Last, Mir to be Ditched [slashdot.org] by CmdrTaco on Thu Nov 16, '00 07:45 AM MST 267

    Mir To Crash Into Pacific [slashdot.org] by Hemos on Mon Oct 23, '00 08:48 AM MST 282

    Mir Likely To Be Deorbited [Updated] [slashdot.org] by timothy on Tue Oct 03, '00 12:06 PM MST 321

  • Tis a pity that after having spent all that energy pushing that much metal out of ye old Terran Gravity Well, that we cannot find a way to use it, rather then let it fall back down the well. I mean why not give it to the ISS for furture in-orbit construction, ie: for a Mars craft. We're only going to have to shove it back up again. Different set of atoms, same stuff.


    --
    Remove the rocks to send email
  • I remember thinking several years ago when Mir suffered every disaster that didn't involve weather or earthquakes, that it was amazing how well it survived all of the problems. I hope that the lessons learned from it are put to good use on the ISS.
  • The free-floater is going to be dependant on ISS and won't have indepentant docking mechanisms for anything other then the ISS. It's supposed to be a free floating factory without crew for generating things that need extreme microgravity (eg, any manned vessel is not usable for growing certain crystals and making certain measurements because people are always shaking the station).

    This is NOT an alternative to Mir, sadly. That, and since MirCorp is behind it, it's unlikely to see the light of day. They started strong w/ Mir, but they didn't use enough sense and oversold themselves before they got METS.
  • I was wondering about that mutant space fungus on the Mir too. It has been up there mutating like crazy in the radiation. Isn't it a threat when it comes back to earth on board the deorbiting (crashing) Mir. Who knows what over lifeforms (like bacteria) may be up there as well. I think it would be much safer though much more expensive to blast Mir into space than to have it crash into earth.
  • It's not going to happen as the inclination of Mir is different from ISS. Inclination changes are among the most "expensive" in terms of delta-V operations. However, FINDS's [finds-space.org] MET project would have used atmospheric drag to change the inclination of Mir gradually change the orbit of Mir using an electromagnetic tether.

    Actually the Russians wanted to have ISS at the same inclination but for political reasons a "compromise" inclination was chosen that is sub-optimal for everyone involved. Even as late as the launch of the first Russian module they were pushing to switch the inclination. If they did that, the stations could at least serve as lifeboats to each other and some modules and/or equipment could be moved over. Remember, much of Mir dates to 1995 when the "American" modules were launched. (Read Dragonfly if you have a chance, it's a great book, I'm surprised someone hasn't submitted a review yet)

    Of course, Mir would need a substancial capital infusion if it were to return to operational status. That was the whole point of MirCorp, not to use a dying station, but to re-fit it & open it for commercial operations. Hopefully their latest plans will go smoother.

    -Jay Thomas

    http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2 [uiuc.edu]

  • IIRC it was not manned and operational continuously (it was also not capable of that). There were a total of 3 missions to the station, the longest one lasting 84 days. Skylab was more or less abandoned since early 1974 up until reentry. Mir was manned continuously from 1986 up until some time in 1999. Also, the Russians had other space stations before that (Salyut 1-7). Salyut 7 was up for 9 years, but was also not manned all the time. I'm not as ignorant as you think.

  • Or possibly a web cam mounted to it? On pay-per-view, of course.

  • O, Station Aloft
    Mold ridden you may have been
    Now burn, fall and die.

    As it'were, and twas, it tiss and twill be.
    Thusly spake, the word of Bob.

  • Obligatory "end of the world" post

    "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning
    as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers, and upon the
    fountains of waters;
    "And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters
    became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
    bitter."

    END Obligatory "end of the world" post
    Well, someone had to post it :P
  • I'll see your heavens above and raise you NASA's JTRACK 3D [nasa.gov]

    Make sure you select from the other tools in the top frame to find viewing times of many objects from various earthbound locales.

  • I think its a shame bringing down MIR. Its a part of our history and it should remain up there in orbit. Maybee in the not to distant future it could be a museum. Its already in a stable orbit so why not leave it, i will cost more to bring it down than to let it set empty up there.


  • If the Russians could just wait a few more years, I promise them, I will do my best to retrieve the 'Mir' space-station for them, returning it safely so that they may stick it in a museum. Considering certain advances in RLV technology [nasa.gov], a heavy lifter shuttle-barge is sure to be developed soon- and I'm going to buy one. I will gladly swing by and pick it up for them. Can someone please suggest they park it in a libration point [findarticles.com], someone that knows a powerful Russian politico personally?

    :)Fudboy
  • Back in the days of Skylab, the only TV (for the US) was the horrible 3 tv networks.

    But today, in the 21st century, I wonder if some new network, maybe CNN, or heck, maybe even NASA could have a high altitude plane attempt to film any or all of the re-entry and subsequent shower of hardware?


    You can kill the revolution, but first you have to kill all the revolutionaries.
  • 100 tons of equipment is being thrown away. But what would you propose to do with it otherwise?

    It's 15 year old equipment. Technology has change a lot in 15+ years. (The equipment was probably obsolete at launch time anyway.) Moving equipment from one orbit to another probably exceeds the value of launching new equipment. Not to mention reliability issues. People to strip off old equipment, etc.

    It would cost significant money to try to "save" MIR. The fungus would continue growing. One of the modules is currently depressurized and uninhabitable. So what would be the point of spending even more money to make it just one more piece of orbiting space junk?

    One idea that springs to mind is to salvage smaller parts of equipment. But it's still all "used" and "obsolete" equipment. Who wants "used" parts in space where everything must work. You can't just call up a repairman because one of your CRT's just quit working.

    Now to try "Think Different"...

    In fact, one of the several reasons to abandon MIR is because it is just too dangerous for Americans. Other reasons include, not establishing a second-hand market for used space junk -- thus decreasing the amount of money congress sends to needy space contractors. Bringing that fungus back down to earth is a neato experiment to see what will happen. If Russia were to keep MIR, it would potentially reduce the fighting over control of the ISS. As you can see from this paragraph, there are lots of reasons to bring down MIR.


    You can wound the revolution, but first you have to kill all the revolutionaries.
  • All of MIR's parts were probably obsolete at launch time, 15 years ago.

    It probably would cost as much to "save" some of MIR's parts as to launch new shiny, up to date equipment. Add it up. Cost to launch a salvage crew. Cost to keep MIR operational. Cost to transfer equipment between two different orbits. Cost to return salvage crew to earth, possibly including a trip to ISS. Then you still end up with an empty useless shell of MIR in orbit as yet another (large) piece of space junk.

    Reliability? Who wants to have used, obsolete, space junk in an environment where your life can depend on the reliability of equipment?

    Fungus problems. Why even remotely risk bringing any fungus to ISS from MIR. It's bad enough bringing fungus from earth.

    Part of MIR is uninhatibable and depressurized.


    You can kill the revolution, but first you have to kill the revolutionaries.
  • Well, it has been up there way beyond anyone's expectations. The station was designed to be in space only for a decade or so. It being able to be up there so long is practicly a miracle, so this was just a matter of time...
  • Are the Russians going to plan the construction of a station to replace MIR? I think splashing down MIR without a replacement in progress/inorbit is a serious injury to the collective progress of space exploration for the human species in general.

  • Looks like MirCorp has approval for "Mir 2" (Score:3)

    by jthomas2 ( 102083 ) on Saturday January 13, 2001 @11:36AM (#509506)
    Russia Space Agency seems to be on board now. There were a few news reports but it hasn't gotton a whole lot of publicity.

    There is a link here [spacedaily.com].

    Sounds like they are building a free-floater that will co-orbit & can dock w/ ISS so it can use the same re-supply mechanisms as ISS but yet be completely independent so you don't have to fill out 7 kg of paperwork before you can dock w/ it.

    It also seems as if Titov has approval to go on ISS in April. We'll see how it all works out though. Should be interesting.

    -Jay Thomas

    http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2 [uiuc.edu]

  • no surprise (Score:3)

    by divide_by_0 ( 176557 ) on Saturday January 13, 2001 @11:26AM (#509507)
    Why does this come to a surprise to everyone, everything up in space has a intended lifespan, MIR has far out lived its expectations. Its actualy pretty remarkable engineering, look how long it too america to finaly get a space station into orbit. I respect NASA, but i wish they would actualy get going and quit stalling.

  • Space fungus (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday January 13, 2001 @11:31AM (#509508) Journal
    Regarding the space fungus [slashdot.org] known to reside on Mir:

    Is this now a new species?

    and as such, is it subject to the endangered species act?
    (Waitaminute - they're russians!)

    or is this going a bad movie version of the Andromenda Strain?

    I imagine that this fungus problem will be something that they will have plenty of time to sort out on the new space station.

    That may be the ultimate problem to long distance space travel.

    Avoiding being consumed by space fungus.

  • This is sad (Score:4)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Saturday January 13, 2001 @11:44AM (#509509) Homepage
    This is really too bad. 100+ tons of equipment are basically being thrown away, and that's a damn shame. If US export restrictions hadn't stopped MirCorp from exporting the METS electrodynamic tether to Russia for launch to the Mir, Mir could have been put into a high storage orbit.

    METS uses an electrical cable that's deployed a few kilometers towards the earth that has an electrical charge run through it to act against the Earth's magnetic field and push whatever it's attached to upwards. Using this, Mir could be at 400 or 500 miles up now, safe from danger of atmospheric drag and all at the cost of one Progress launch (METS fits on one Progress).

    Sigh....

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