No one has kept a manned spacecraft flying longer, and through an incredible string of troubles, including a near-fatal crash with a cargo ship.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union funding became ever more shaky until a deal was struck with the US to supply Russian space station expertise and hands-on training in the course of development of the International space station.
Now many Americans and other international spacefarers have spent time on Mir including Shannon Lucid who set her record for an American woman in space during her 188-day stay on Mir.
The flexible Mir component architecture is to be the basis for the new International Space Station. But now most U.S space officials feel that Mir is a drain on the Russian space program and is contributing to delays with the new station. (While the Russians have launched some of their modules they are about a year and a half behind schedule on the critical service module (which will include astronaut living quarters)).
Russia agreed to ditch the Mir with a controlled burn aimed at a remote stretch of the Pacific Ocean, but bowing to pressure from the Energiya company that built and operates the station and a ground swell of public feeling led by former cosmonauts, Vitaly Sevastyanov and German Titov, now members of the lower house of the Russian parliament, President Yeltsin agreed that the station could stay up if Energiya could finance it on their own.
Government financing runs out in August when the last crew returns to Earth, but it will be left in orbit until its birthday in February 2000.
The Mir costs about $250 million a year to operate. Sergei Gromov, Energiya spokesman said the station is stacked with expensive and valuable scientific equipment that should be harvested for use on the new international space station. Additionally Mir could even serve as a kind of lifeboat for the new station in case of an emergency evacuation.
"Who knows, maybe by that time (February) the situation will change and we won't have to bring the station down ... and the invaluable equipment on board can again serve mankind."
At a news conference Sevastyanov said "To sink the station would be a crime against posterity".
"To save the station, we are ready to deal with anybody," said Gromov. "By drowning the Mir, we are drowning our future for dozens of years ahead".
"With the loss of the Mir, the Russians are going to lose their last great space achievement, a home for humans in space," said Charles Vick, a senior space researcher with the Federation of American Scientists.
Mir 27 Commander Viktor Afanasyev, Flight Engineer Gennady Padalka and French Astronaut Jean-Pierre Haignere will be the last crew on Mir unless someone can come up with the funding.
Under pressure from the US to abandon MIR and concentrate on the International Space Station (Russia is going to be close to two years behind on its ISS commitments in the very best of circumstances and some of these commitments like the living quarters for the astronauts are critical as NASA cannot proceed with in-orbit construction work without the module), the Russian government is withdrawing funding for the MIR.
A determined alliance centered in Moscow has formed to keep MIR alive but the joker is the huge cost of operating MIR. Russians Viktor Afanasyev and Sergei Avdeyev and Frenchman Jean-Pierre Haignere are due to leave Mir next month and the station will be unmanned for up to half a year as Moscow tries to raise money to send a new crew.
If the money is not found, they are likely to be the last crew and the MIR will be ditched into the ocean under remote control.
In late June, the air pressure aboard MIR started dropping. The Russians kept it secret for two weeks, before an unidentified Russian space official, denying that the problem should be identified as a leak, revealed that the station was no longer hermetically sealed.
"There is no danger. The air pressure has been dropping for about two weeks," said the official, who declined to be identified. "They are calmly trying to find what is causing the problem. ... We are not treating this as an accident or an emergency, and there is no need for panic. They have plenty of oxygen supplies," the official said.
But other problems were waiting for the space station, and from an unlikely source.
The Soviet Union made the Baikonur Cosmodrome its primary space launch pad, and Russia continues to use it under commercial agreement with Kazakhstan, which inherited the site when communism collapsed in 1991.
The Russians, while far ($300 million) behind on their payments, continue to use the Cosmodrome to launch its Proton rockets. The Proton is the workhorse of the Russian space program, ferrying up commercial satellites as well as crews to the Mir space station and modules of the new international space station.
The commercial satellites are of some importance since the Proton can carry heavier loads than the American launch vehicles and they are an important source of badly needed revenue for the Russians.
Another reason for the importance of the Proton rockets are that, except for those associated with the Space Shuttle, American launch vehicles have been blowing up with expensive cargo aboard for the last few years, with rather disturbing regularity (six in the last year). The Proton rocket by contrast is very reliable (the last Proton accident had occurred in 1993 and many, many successful flights have taken place since then).
Until the first week of July 1999.
A Proton booster rocket loaded with a communications satellite having nothing to do with the MIR crashed.
A malfunction detached the engine and parts of the booster, causing them to crash onto the steppe. The satellite itself crashed in the remote Altai region of Siberia. It was, in fact, rather spectacular. Scattered debris rained over the central Karaganda region of the Kar-Karalinsk district. To make matters worse, this flight was also a test of a new upper stage rocket motor to deliver commercial satellites to their intended orbits. A 200-kg (440 lb.) chunk of the rocket fell into the courtyard of a private house in the district, around 160 km (100 miles) from the main regional center of Karaganda.
The following day Kazakhstan said it would suspend rocket launches from its Baikonur Cosmodrome. "We have informed the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs about our decision to stop launches from Baikonur until reasons for the crash are fully identified and accident damage evaluated," Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The maker of the Russian Proton booster rocket which crashed Monday while carrying a communications satellite defended the model Tuesday, saying it was still reliable. "The Proton is the most reliable machine in the world and this accident in no way spoils this statistic," said Igor Dodin, director of the Khrunishev Space Center factory. Dodin told a Reuters reporter he thought the ban was likely to be lifted by the end of the month. Khrunichev, the builder of the rocket, then announced it would not launch any more Proton rockets until the inquiry is complete.
A spokeswoman for International Launch Services said the next commercial Proton mission was scheduled for Aug. 31 but it was too early to say if there would be a delay. U.S. space officials said they were awaiting information about the crash before determining whether it would delay the $60 billion International Space Station further.
A Kazakhstan government commission left for the central Kar-Karalinsk region Wednesday to assess the damage caused by Monday's crash.
"A government commission has been set up under deputy prime minister (Alexander) Pavlov, and this morning it set off to the scene of the accident," a ministry spokesman said by telephone from the capital Astana.
Chemists and other specialists had been at the scene since Tuesday to establish whether toxic rocket fuel had affected the local water supply and soil, he said. Local officials said no such evidence had been found so far. Tokushev told Reuters that a Russian delegation was also expected to arrive Wednesday, and the groups' findings would be made known in two to three days. He confirmed that no one had been hurt by falling debris.
Kazakhstan demanded compensation from Russia for the accident.
Thursday a Zenith-2 rocket carrying a Ukrainian-Russian satellite was due to have blasted off at 11:37 local time. Russian sources at Baikonur said that the takeoff would probably now take place Friday or Monday. "The delay of the launch was not connected with any technical problems, but with Kazakhstan's ban on flights from the cosmodrome," a Russian space source said. "We expect a decision this evening on whether it will take place tomorrow or Monday."
The foreign ministry of Kazakhstan repeated Thursday that all flights would be banned until the commission made its final report on the accident.
Russia apparently began to get nervous as only six days remained before the planned July 14 launch of a navigation system vital for the manned Mir space station. The computer system was to be launched on a Soyuz rocket carrying a Progress resupply ship. The last Russian-French crew is due to leave Mir in late August, and the system is being installed as a precaution against the station crashing to earth while Moscow tries to raise the extra cash needed to send up a new crew. A Kazakh foreign ministry spokesman said by telephone from Astana that Russia had asked Pavlov to allow the next two launches to go ahead as planned.
Kazakh officials continued checking the water supply and soil for traces of a highly toxic fuel. "If we discover that there is such contamination, then people will be evacuated from the area which must then be urgently deactivated," Serikbek Daukeyev, minister for ecology and natural resources, said on Khabar state television.
Witnesses saw pieces of the rocket fall into a nearby lake and said there was a strong smell of rotten fish, which specialists said came from a rocket fuel component known as "giptil" in Russian. Meirbek Moldabekov, head of Kazakhstan's space agency, said that at least 115 square miles had been affected and that "giptil" was "highly toxic." An official at Russia's mission control center said it was "sufficiently toxic."
"There were explosions in the air and poisonous gas was released into the atmosphere," Moldabekov told Reuters by telephone from Karaganda, a town not far from the crash scene.
"The Russian side must take full responsibility for this (material loss)," Daukeyev said.
Russia said only Proton Rockets should be suspended.
Kazakhstan said the ban applies to all craft.
"They have threatened the whole space program and even the lives of the team aboard Mir, because the Progress ship...is critical,'' Sergei Gorbunov, press secretary for the head of the Russian Space Agency, told Khabar from Moscow.
Kazakh officials criticized the absence of senior Russian representatives at the scene of the crash. Kazakhstan's foreign ministry said it expects rent payments for Baikonur to resume this month. The annual charge is $115 million according to the 1994 agreement allowing Russia to rent the Cosmodrome for 20 years.
On Friday, engineers announced the rocket exploded because of a rapid chain reaction in its engines. Rocket scientists at the Khrunichev Space Center, where the heavy Proton boosters are built, said a commission was leaving for Kazakhstan Friday to investigate the crash of the rocket, which it was now revealed was carrying a defense satellite into orbit.
Sergei Petrakovsky, deputy chief designer at Khrunichev, said the Proton exploded when a problem spread through the four engines in the booster rocket's second stage. "The incident was like an explosion," he said at a news conference. "It was something that spread quickly -- in one of the engines, then in the others. ... The whole incident happened in a second -- it is very tough to analyze it now,' he said.
He said he expected the commission to report preliminary results of its investigation by the 20th.
Engineers said they believed the newly-tested upper stage Briz rocket, designed to maneuver and place a number of satellites into different orbits, was shielded from the blast.
Khrunichev Deputy Director Anatoly Nedaivoda said the Briz, carrying a Raduga defense communications probe, may have fallen to earth with its fuel, the toxic mix, giptil. "The engine of the Briz could have made it to earth in that stage, and in that stage are about six tons of giptil. The only thing that could have an ecological affect on the place where it fell is that component in the central tank,'' he said. However he also said it was unlikely that giptil had fallen into a lake and contaminated the water supply.
Kazakhstan claimed to have found traces of giptil in the lake.
Nedaivoda said Kazakhstan's response was emotional but predicted the space program would soon be back on track. "A rational solution will be found. Space progress will continue." He said the launch of the next module of the $60 billion International Space Station, planned for November on a Proton, would not be postponed.
Sunday, Kazakhstan accused neighboring Russia of negligence in the increasingly acrimonious row over space launches that threatened to ground the key supply rocket carrying food and air to the manned Mir space station.
Kazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev said Moscow had failed to react adequately to the accident. "Unfortunately, we do not feel that the Russian side is particularly concerned," Balgimbayev said in a statement.
Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian Space Agency, told Balgimbayev at a meeting Sunday that preliminary tests by Russian scientists showed there was no trace of giptil. He said a team of top specialists would fly to the scene of the accident Tuesday to investigate further.
Koptev repeated an appeal for Kazakhstan to waver its flight ban for the Progress ship, due to take off Wednesday with food supplies for the French-Russian crew as well as a vital navigation system for the troubled station. The crew is due to leave the station by late August, and the system is a precaution against Mir crashing to earth while Moscow scrapes the funds together to send up another team.
The Mir has an inclined orbit that "shifts" as the Earth rotates beneath it, so without the navigation system it could come down virtually anywhere. The Mir Crew have a lifeboat and could abandon the Mir as supplies run out, but then when the navigation system was launched, there would be no crew to install it.
Balgimbayev said a general agreement under which Russia rents Baikonur may have to be restructured. "All of this forces Kazakhstan to rethink a number of aspects as to how Baikonur is used, including moving from a system of warning about impending launches to a permission system," he said.
Russian media speculated today that the launch ban had nothing to do with environmental damage caused by the accident, but was an attempt by Kazakhstan to force Russia to pay the back debt it owes for renting Baikonur.
"The background of the conflict is strictly mercantile, and not ecological," the daily Segodnya newspaper said. "It's clear that (Kazakhstan) is playing the Baikonur card because it knows full well what the launches mean to the Russian space program."
A Baikonur spokesman said preparations for the Progress launch were underway in spite of the suspension. "We are preparing for the launch Wednesday," he said. "However, it is not clear what the situation over the ban is, and I'm not prepared to try to predict what will happen."
*** Last Minute Flash **** Russia and Kazakhstan reached some kind of deal while continuing to criticize each other. The Mir guidance system WILL go up. Whew!!!! The ban was lifted Wed. July 14 and a Progress rocket is scheduled to be launched Friday July 16, according to the Los Angeles Times.