Word: mir
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Michael Foale didn't notice last June when the bluebird began to chirp aboard the Mir space station. Ordinarily, anyone in the station's core module could not have missed the sudden trilling. But at the moment, Foale was elsewhere. And he had other things on his mind besides a singing bird...
...Mir bird was not a real bird, of course. It was a small plastic model that broke into song when its switch was thrown. Lately it had begun singing whenever it was jostled, and on this day it got jostled hard. Just moments before, the station's commander, Vasili Tsibliyev, had attempted to bring an unmanned cargo vessel in for a remote-control docking. When the ship was just a few yards from the station, it suddenly flew wide of the docking port, sideswiped one of the station's solar panels and slammed broadside into its Spektr science module...
...mishap last summer was the most troubling incident in a troubling year for the geriatric Mir. Already the 11-year-old ship had experienced a breakdown in its oxygen system, a series of leaks in its cooling system and an onboard fire. In the months following the collision, there were power blackouts, repeated failures in the ship's flickering computer and even an alarming irregularity in Tsibliyev's heartbeat...
...David Wolf, an American astronaut aboard the Russian space station Mir, on a Texas law passed in June which allows registered voters to cast ballots from space. Wolf will transmit his vote via e-mail, and a Board of Elections worker will punch a ballot by hand with the astronaut's choices...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla: Spare a thought for Michael Foale. The British-born NASA Astronaut spent four-and-a-half months on Mir during the station's most critical moments; now he can't even get home. Poor weather, gusty wind and intense cloud-cover over Florida frustrated the Shuttle Atlantis' attempts to return Foale to Earth Sunday. NASA instructed the seven-member shuttle crew to stay aloft an extra day and try to land at Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Monday. It wasn't the only hitch in space traffic: back on Mir, a cargo ship docking was delayed...