A special interdepartmental commission is now being formed to handle the "final phase of the flight of the Mir orbiting complex."

Viktor Blagov, the deputy head of the Mir program, said the station has already been put on stand-by, the central onboard computer system has been turned on, and the gyrodines that maintain the station's position have been started.

All the onboard systems have already been tested, Blagov said. Mission control is constantly receiving full telemetric data from the station, he said.

As reported earlier, a government commission in December approved a resolution on the final phase of Mir's operation that noted the station had fulfilled all the tasks set before it in its 15 years in orbit.

A Progress M1-5 tanker with extra fuel reserves is set to take off for Mir on January 18 to give the station additional maneuverability in case its descent from orbit is too rapid and thus help ensure it comes down in a safe area of the South Pacific.

If necessary, an emergency crew will be sent to the station aboard a piloted Soyuz TM ship that is already sitting at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan and is ready for pre-launch operations. It will be launched only in two eventualities: if the Progress M1-5 tanker is unable to dock with Mir automatically, or if there is a serious malfunction in the station's control system.

The emergency crew would include commander Gennady Padalka and flight engineer Nikolai Budarin. At one time they trained for a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) that was readied in case the Zvezda service module was unable to dock with the ISS's Zarya-Unity tandem.

Mir, which has been on autopilot since June 2000, currently weighs about 130 tonnes, including 11.5 tonnes of scientific equipment built by 27 countries.

Mir was put into orbit on February 20, 1986, since when it has hosted 104 cosmonauts and astronauts. Mir has been home to 28 long-term stays and 16 shorter missions lasting from a week to a month, including 15 international missions with participants from France, Germany, Austria, Japan, Britain, Bulgaria, Syria, Afghanistan, Slovaki and the European Space Agency. There have also been nine short visits of three to five days by U.S. space shuttles during which 37 American astronauts visited the station.

Emercency Crews On Standby To Fly To Mir
Three "emergency" crews will be prepared to fly up to the Russian space station Mir in a week at most, head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut training center Pyotr Klimuk said in an interview with Interfax.

The standby cosmonauts will go up to Mir only if it becomes necessary in order to ensure that the station is safely deorbited, Klimuk said. "These crews will have their final complex test training January 9-12, on the basis of which the state committee will decide on their readiness to go to Mir," he said.

"The crew will be chosen depending on the situation with the [space station's] orbit," he explained. "In the case of emergency [problems with the station's orientation, loss of communication with the station or other serious difficulties] our most experienced cosmonauts--commander of the Soyuz-TM spacecraft Gennady Padalka and onboard engineer Nikolai Budarin--will fly," Klimuk said.

According to Klimuk, in the case of less serious problems (for example, if the Progress MI ship cannot dock with Mir automatically), commander Salizhan Sharipov and onboard engineer Pavel Vinogradov will go on the mission.

There is yet another standby crew: commander Talgat Musabayev and onboard engineer Yuri Baturin.

Klimuk said he regrets the fact that the Russian government decided to deorbit Mir and send it splashing into the Pacific Ocean. In his opinion, he said, the constant presence of cosmonauts on the station could make it possible to use it a few more years. Klimuk did say he believes, however, that "it is becoming dangerous to continue letting the station fly unmanned."

He said that if ending the space station's working life goes as planned, no cosmonauts will go. Mir will have been deorbited by the spring. Copyright 2000 Interfax. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by Interfax and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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