Mir is Down

I have spent the whole night at a crapy Internet cafe just to watch live-on, on some special website, the 'evolution', if you could call it like that, of the ex-Soviet MIR space station, as it performed its controlled crash in the Pacific Ocean.
It was interesting to notice that the American people on that channel, were in fact very sentimental when coming to MIR and they also 'cried' when it 'hugged' the 'ground' ;)
But in fact, this was a late retirement so-to-speak. MIR Space Station was only scheduled to last for about 10-15 years, and therefore it should've been retired many years earlier.
The lack of a replacement, coming from either nowadays Russia or from the United States, as well as the constant need for space research that could not had been performed anywhere else, made the MIR stretch its service period, of course at a huge cost as well as some dangers.
Not many people know about the danger fires that had started from time to time inside the space station, leaving the astronauts inside without electricity and sometimes even oxygen for some time, as well as giving them a heck of a scare.
As one American astronaut described it, Mir space station was 'the most dangerous environment in the world', as it could fail at any time, without previous warning. Even the Russians agreed that the station is a messy gathering of tons and tons and miles and miles or wires, cables and pipes, all of them packed pretty roughly together and with the possibility of a crack developing anytime. Everybody agreed, Mir was a dangerous station and it had to go down. Then why does it feel so sad when we had to kiss it goodbye ?
Interestingly enough, Iran wanted to purchase the station and use it for... military purposes ! With the declared goal of, more or less, attacking the USA from space! Now those guys are loonatics... Fortunately for us, and for them due to the dangerous nature of that station, they've made up their minds too late, when the station was already going down. I forgot the figure for which they wanted to buy it, but I think I remember it as being somewhere between $800 million and one billion dollars... amazing.
Well, MIR is down, but the space station will be up and running very soon. The International Space Station will be bigger, more advanced, and most importantly, safer. But we must not forget the great contribution that MIR and the Soviet Space Programme brought to the ISS, nor the wreckage that lies in the Pacific Ocean right now, which was once, world's first space station...

Copyright ©2001 by Sorin A Crâsmarelu

6th of March 2001