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| S P E C I A L | Repairing Mir |
Russian bureaucrat in space?
August 26, 1997
Web posted at: 1:10 p.m. EDT (1710 GMT)
Yeltsin aide may go to Mir
Latest developments:
MOSCOW (CNN) -- Russian space officials announced Tuesday a proposal to show confidence in the troubled space station Mir -- the first bureaucrat in orbit.
Yuri Baturin, the secretary of President Boris Yeltsin's security council, may go aboard Mir next year. The Russian Space Agency says it's considering the idea, which was ridiculed as "a political move" by the Russian media.
Baturin, 48, would need to lose weight before heading into space. But he already has undergone medical tests and preliminary training, including exposure to zero-gravity.
He has said rumors about Mir's demise are false. On Tuesday, Yeltsin said the space station "is living and will live on" despite attempts to "write it off."
Snafu caused oxygen scare
On Monday, a communications snafu between U.S. and Russian space officials turned a quickly fixed air supply problem aboard Mir into talk of possible evacuation.
"Everything is fine," Vladimir Solovyov, the head of Russia's Mission Control, told reporters. "We have no problems with the quality of air on board."
Monday's scare about the orbiter's air supply system was due in part to a lack of communications between Mir's ground staff and their U.S. counterparts.
The U.S. space agency NASA touched off a brief panic when officials in Houston announced that both the main and backup oxygen-generating systems on Mir were not working.
If that were the case, the two Russians and one American on board would have to fix the systems within days or face the prospect of abandoning the space station.
When NASA made the first announcement it was almost midnight in Moscow, where space officials had long since gone home without reporting any new problems aboard the Mir.
It wasn't until Tuesday morning that Russian officials announced that both oxygen systems had been fixed by 10:30 p.m. Monday -- before NASA even announced the problem.
What went wrong
Mission control officials said the main oxygen generating system -- called the Elektron -- had been acting up for several days and shut down on Monday. The crew discovered it was an electrical contact problem.
In the meantime, they tried to use the backup system that uses canisters, which they ignite, to form oxygen. But they couldn't get them lighted.
It turned out the firing pin had become too dull after repeated use. They replaced it with an extra pin.
A frustrated Viktor Blagov, deputy chief flight controller for the Mir program, criticized the media for "distorting" the story. "The press overreacts," he said. "This is a very minor technical problem, but the reports about it sound like a huge, tragic calamity. This is really wrong."
Meantime, three of four solar panels on Mir's damaged Spektr module are supplying energy from the sun for the first time since Spektr was punctured in a collision two months ago.
The cosmonauts performed an internal spacewalk Friday to reconnect power cables to the damaged module.
The crew has not yet been able to fully align the panels toward the sun. The power being received was being used to recharge batteries.
Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty and Correspondent John Holliman contributed to this report.
· MIR MAIN PAGE · RELATED SITES · HISTORY ·
· TIMELINE · GALLERY · SOYUZ · CREW · REPAIR MISSION ·
- CNN In-Depth: Space
- Video Almanac: 1996 - Mir and Atlantis dock
- Video Almanac: 1986 - Soviets launch Mir
- Message Board: Repairing Mir
Related stories:
- Mir crew takes well-earned rest - August 23, 1997
- Mir plugged in again - August 22, 1997
Related sites:
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- Oxygen candles from NASA's Mir pages
- American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology
- Russian Space Science Internet
- Russian Space Research Insstitute (IKI)
- NASA Shuttle-Mir Web
- Keith's MIR Page
- ISS Phase I - Space Station Mir
- Russian Space Agency
- MIR Space Station - Maximov Online
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