Mir odyssey

Mir odyssey

There was delicious symbolism in Mir's last moments before it plunged all aglow to a watery grave in the South Pacific last week. A bunch of space junkies who had planned to chase Mir in two chartered airplanes as it made its slow descent caught just a passing white dot from the island they had reckoned would provide them the best view. Instead, inhabitants of Fiji were entertained with a blinding round of cosmic fireworks as debris of the sprawling Russian space station plummeted into the Pacific Ocean.

The sad plight of four expectant Russian cosmonauts, among the space buffs assembled on an island to the east, who missed this one last chance to utter an ode to the 143-tonne space station aboard which they had once found shelter and shed a few pride-laced tears perhaps best sums up Mir's long and chequered history. Having been first launched into space in February 1986, having been the site of 23,000 scientific experiments and having hosted more than a hundred humans -- in the process doing its bit for the chirpy US-Russian bonhomie to overshadow the me-too rivalry of the cold war years -- Mir's last minutes surely deserved a more emotional response. Surely the ``thank God, it didn't strike land'' sighs should have been complemented with more glowing epitaphs about its service to science.

After all, Mir was the site of 23,000 experiments, according toòf40ó Science magazine. The near absolute weightlessness that it provided allowed experimentation unthinkable on Earth in materials as diverse as medicines, semi-conductors and fibre optics. Besides pursuing still classified military research, scientists also gleaned insights into the evolution of the universe. And in the process, man's abiding desire for establishing inhabitable colonies in space was kept alive, with studies in human endurance (especially after Valery Polyakov spent 438 straight days aboard Mir in 1994-95) and in growing plants in space. Little wonder then that this effort at long-term human habitation in space is a source of such pride for Russians, confronted as they are now with statistics being spewed out in learned journals equating their country with Pakistan in terms of population and with Finland in terms of gross domestic product.

Is the demise of Mir -- to be replaced now by the International Space Station, with a leading role played by NASA -- then a metaphor for first the end of the Soviet Union and then the slow decline of Russia? Many would argue so, citing like everybody else Mir's post-1997 years with their abundance of glitches. They would no doubt bundle Mir, with its astronomical maintenance costs, with other follies of the Soviet era. This would be a cruel exaggeration. Instead, Mir should be seen in its historical context. The romance of space travel was still alive that February day in 1986 when it was launched. It was still a time when every first in space was construed as a giant step for all mankind, when such feats did not have to be rationalised by balancing bulky budgets against tangible returns. Fifteen years later, space agencies have to justify every penny spent. Why else would Save Mir campaigns have countenanced suggestions that it be leased out to American programmers for reality TV shows?