Word: mir
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MOSCOW: "It's simply indecent," fumes Russian Space Mission Control Center Chief Deputy Viktor Blagov, responding to American charges that the 11-year-old space station Mir, currently hosting American astronaut Jerry Linenger, is on its last legs. "We would ask the Americans: What kind of experts are you to think about deserting this unique space platform?" According to NASA, cautious ones. Mir has undergone a worrisome stretch of technical foul-ups lately, ranging from an overheated living module to the explosion of an oxygen-generating canister. While the Russians insist everything is under control, NASA does not share their...
...Russian space program, the comeback was supposed to begin this month. Ever since the fall of communism, the agency that gave the world Sputnik, Gagarin and the space station Mir appeared to have fallen too, with slashed budgets leading to fewer launches and worried whispers in the international community that even those missions were dangerously underfinanced. Lately, however, Russia has been funneling all its space resources into the launch of its Mars '96 probe, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit the Red Planet, dispatch a quartet of landers to the surface and, perhaps most important, return the country...
Norman Thagard, the only other American to live aboard Mir, spent 115 days on the station last year, losing 17 lbs. and complaining afterward of the "cultural isolation" he felt while aloft. Lucid found that she was sometimes treated like a second-class passenger. Her crewmates occasionally left Mir to conduct maintenance outside. When they did, they placed red tape over the communications panel, a blunt sign to their guest that she was not to fool with a system they assumed she did not understand. The cultural gulf threatened to get even wider when a ranking officer in the Russian...
Lucid, who took the delays sportingly, realized she would be earning her pay in space this trip as soon as she crawled into Mir last March, joining the two men she came to know affectionately as her "two Yuris"--cosmonauts Yuri Onufrienko and Yuri Usachev. The Russian station is a cluster of six cramped, camper-size pods, with most of the living space devoted to labs. Personnel sleep in curtained, closet-like enclosures at the end of one pod and exercise with their bodies bungeed into place on treadmills; when it comes time for a shower, they must...
Spartan as Mir is, its science facilities are first rate, and Lucid, a biochemist, spent much of her time aloft studying how the space environment affects living tissue and how protein crystals grow in zero gravity. Like others who have tried to live and work in space, however, she found that the living part doesn't always go as well as the working part...