Russia's Mir station kindergarten in space

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The last time I saw the prototype of the Russian space shuttle Buran, it was sitting in Gorky Park in Moscow, covered in snow, awaiting conversion into an up-market restaurant. That says a lot about the financial plight of the Russian space program: Buran, like many other projects, was scrapped because the money ran out. But it doesn't tell you anything about the competence, dedication, and ingenuity of the Russians who still work in the space program -- and the world's media haven't been telling us much about that either.

The Russian space station Mir has been in orbit for eleven years, but it's only since its run of bad luck started with a fire in February that the rest of the world has finally noticed it's there. And almost all the media coverage has been negative, not just about Mir's advanced age (like the U.S. space shuttles, it was built in the 1980s using late 1970s technology), but about Russian technology, Russian skills, and Russia in general. It's what the media do best: suddenly notice a problem that everybody paying attention has known about for years, inflate it into an instant crisis, pontificate sententiously about it for a week or two -- and often, miss the point entirely. The point in this case being that Mir is not a failure but a remarkable success.

Mir's designers didn't expect it to remain in use more than five years, so there has been a lot of modification and repair as its original components wore out or became obsolete. It isn't perfectly safe, either; space isn't. But for the past eleven years, while American shuttle crews paid brief tourist visits to orbit, Russians have been living there. Ninety percent of the total time that people have spent in space has been spent aboard Mir.

It is not falling apart before our very eyes, either. The February fire may have been due to faulty equipment, but both last month's collision with a cargo drone that holed the Spektr module and halved the station's power, and last week's computer failure that plunged Mir into darkness and left it spinning out of control, were plain old human error.

If somebody accidentally unplugs a computer from its power source, it will crash whether it is eleven years old or brand new. If you miscalculate the mass of a cargo drone when moving it by remote control, it will not stop where you want it to, and it may crash into you. At least one of Mir's three-man crew has very poor hand-brain coordination, which is not a good thing on a spacecraft.

As a result of these problems, the morale aboard Mir is pretty low, which has turned into a problem in its own right. "This is a kindergarten," muttered Mission Control Director Vladimir Solovyov at one point in June, as he ordered the three-man crew of Mir to stop their preparations to abandon ship. He deserves our sympathy -- but more importantly, he deserves our respect.

Solovyov is a former cosmonaut himself, and typical of the generation that made the old Soviet Union first into space, first to put a human being into orbit, and first to build a permanent space station, all using technology and construction methods as different from the American approach as a Lada is from a Cadillac. And frankly, if you are venturing off the beaten track, you might be better off driving a Lada.

Ladas break down from time to time, but they are easily repaired and they never fail catastrophically. The same is true of Russian spacecraft: in 40 years of Soviet and Russian space exploration, only two cosmonauts have died in space or on the pad.

The equivalent American figure is ten -- and the U.S. space program was very fortunate not to lose three more on Apollo 13. This is not just bad luck. The United States started the space race far behind, so it cut a lot of safety corners to catch up. In addition, the American fascination with high-tech solutions produced systems that were brilliantly elegant while they worked (which was almost always), and catastrophic when they failed.

The U.S. Apollo program was a classic example of the approach: edge-of-the-envelope technology, millions of different components, and mission plans of breath-taking complexity. It worked: Americans were first on the Moon. But the last three missions were canceled as much for safety reasons as to save money.

The Russians plodded steadfastly on, and in 1986 they put up the world's first orbital station, Mir. It was no mean achievement. The Freedom space station that begins construction late this year will weigh 400 tons and have a permanent crew of six. Mir, put up eleven years ago, weighs 120 tons and has a permanent crew of three.

Congressman James Sensenbrenner, head of the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, gives sound bites about how "I, for one, can no longer stand idly by as mishap after mishap occurs while we continue to plan the next shuttle mission to Mir." But in fact the Russian space station has all the virtues and defects of the T-34 tank: it's ugly, it's not state-of-the- art, but it can survive almost anything.

It's also vital to the survival of the Russian space program, home to about half the space expertise on this planet, because after the collapse of the old Soviet Union the Russian space budget fell by 80 percent. People like Solovyov are being paid less than $400 a month (and often are not paid at all). The only thing keeping the whole show on the road is the $400 million a year that the United States pays to give its astronauts access to Mir.

You could argue that the U.S. is not getting value for money, and in the narrowest sense you might be right. But it is a very small price to pay for preserving all this expertise until Freedom starts operating in two years' time and a whole new era of space exploration begins.

It is an even smaller price to pay for preserving Russian self-respect and a sense of partnership with the U.S. at a time when the NATO alliance is expanding almost up to Russia's own borders. Russians are having a very hard time at the moment, and the openly patronizing tone of Western media coverage of Mir's problems is not just wrong but harmful.

The writer of this article is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 35 countries.