Word: mir
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Last Friday Spektr flickered back to life. In a superbly executed internal space walk, Mir's new commander, Anatoli Solovyev, and his flight engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, floated into the airless lab and installed a new cable system that will provide electricity to Spektr and the rest of the power-thirsty station. "This is a super day," exulted NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who waited out the space walk inside Mir's Soyuz re-entry vehicle, the crew's lifeboat in case they had to abandon ship. "Well done, everybody...
...Mir, it's healthier than it has been all summer. But because of the damage to Spektr's hull, the science module is still uninhabitable by Foale or other NASA astronauts, for whom it normally serves as living quarters and science workshop. Though the listing Mir has taken a big step toward righting itself, its problems in space and on Earth are far from over...
Just how successful the space walk was remains to be seen. It will take several days before the power system is configured and the station's hardware fired back up. Mir generates 15 kW of electricity--about enough to run a small house--and the repairs could help it produce up to 11 more. The additional juice would allow 80% to 90% of the station's planned experiments to be resumed...
With or without power, however, Mir remains a troubled ship. Earlier in the week, Solovyev was guiding an unmanned cargo craft in for a remote-control docking when the station's computer suddenly quit, sending the entire hydra-headed Mir into a slow roll. This swung its solar panels out of alignment with the sun, causing power to flicker and fade, and with it the TV monitor Solovyev was using to steer the cargo ship. But the veteran cosmonaut stayed cool, flying the craft blind until it was safely docked. That, said James van Laak, one of NASA's Mir...
...Earth, former Mir commander Tsibliyev was anything but unflappable. Stung by Yeltsin's declaration that Mir's woes were caused by the "human factor," Tsibliyev made headlines at his postflight press conference by deflecting the blame to Russia's sickly economy, which, he insisted, has not allowed the space agency to maintain the station. "Factories do not operate, and parts have not been delivered," he said. At week's end Tsibliyev was at least partly vindicated when Russian space officials admitted the computer breakdown was caused by an aging component that had not been replaced...