Word: mir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mir's history is more than these accomplishments; it is also a quietly told collection of decidedly unheroic tales--tales of ordinary people living and working in the most extraordinary of places. Only now, as Mir flies its valedictory laps, are many of those stories beginning to come...
...question virtually all Mir crews get asked--particularly the coed teams--is what they did for sex. The answer? Nothing. The occasional pair of lovebirds was sent up for experiments in animal reproduction, but they usually died before returning. The crews' sex lives were little better, limited mostly to dreaming--something they admit they did frequently and vividly. Eating breakfast in the main module in the mornings, cosmonauts would ask one another, "Dognal devushku?" ("Did you catch up with the girl?") Yes meant that you'd had an especially lusty dream the night before; no meant you hadn...
Holidays could be a dreary time aboard Mir, especially for those from the officially atheist U.S.S.R., which had eliminated many of them anyway. On New Year's Eve, crews were permitted to set up a small, nonsectarian tree, which did little to improve the Das Boot ambience. To lift their mood further, they would break out the ship's vacuum cleaner and take turns riding it around the tree--the poor man's jet pack...
Marx may have nixed Christmas, but he said nothing about April Fools' Day, and one Mir crew took advantage of the oversight. On April 1, 1988, cosmonaut Musa Manarov alerted the ground that he had found a mysterious string of numbers written, inexplicably, on the outside of the station. His call was received by Vladimir Bezyaev, a mission-control radio commentator who had been chatting with the cosmonauts and was in on the joke. Bezyaev played it straight, relaying the news to the rest of the control room. "Mission control completely believed [Manarov]," he says. "They even asked...
...time went by and the station aged, crews no longer had the luxury of such pranks. The world remembers Mir for its hair-raising string of crises in the late 1990s--culminating in a collision with an unmanned cargo ship in 1997--but there were other, less publicized near misses. Cosmonaut Alexander Serebrov almost became a satellite himself when his safety tether came loose during a spacewalk. Luckily, he managed to grab hold of the station. In 1994, Mir lost its orientation, causing most of its onboard systems to sputter out, including the fans that keep oxygen circulating. To stay...