Sure, it stank. The Mir space station became a malodorous, filthy, chronically malfunctioning deathtrap. It was an orbiting Dumpster. It crashed into things. It caught on fire. It got moldy. A cosmonaut nearly drifted into space when his tether broke. The occupants of the Mir were constantly in danger of suffocation, hypothermia, irradiation, immolation, and whatever you call it when people are exposed to empty space and their eyeballs pop out.
This was a disaster movie waiting to happen. You get the impression that the whole thing was kept together with Scotch tape and strategically placed wads of chewing gum. Space travel, as originally portrayed in movies and novels, was supposed to be a beautiful thing to behold, elegant, clean to the point of sterility, but the Mir gradually became like something you'd find out behind the barn, propped up on cement blocks.
And yet, as we prepared Thursday for the Mir to burn up and disintegrate over the South Pacific, our hearts were heavy. The Mir was one of the great characters in the still-brief narrative of human spaceflight. It had personality in an industry that has tried to be personality-free. It had brio and verve. It was the little tin can that could.
Mock it all you want. The fact is, the Mir outlasted the empire that created it.
Overachievers are rare in the space business. The Mir didn't know the meaning of the word "quit." Built to last three years, maybe five, Mir stayed in orbit for 15, and circled the world more than 86,000 times. That puts Skylab, six years in orbit, to shame. The defenders of Mir are probably right when they say it had just one bad year, 1997 a brief burst when it kept catching on fire and getting lost in space and accidentally crashing into the sun and whatnot.
"It was a fantastic achievement for its time," NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said Thursday. "I think the Russian people ought to be proud."
Did Mir deserve its deathtrap reputation? Goldin didn't think so. "No one died. No one really got hurt. It was up there 15 years. All you have to do is look at what happens on submarines, look at what happens on planes. Fifteen years. I think it's a testament to the quality of the hardware the Russians built."
When you look back upon the various cars you've owned, you are always fondest of the rust buckets, the cars where you could see the road through a hole beside your left foot. Everyone has bought at least one car from someone who said, "If it doesn't start when you turn the key, just wiggle this little wire right here." Someday, when there are cities in space, all of them standardized, modular and glitchless, people will fondly recall the jalopy that was the Mir.
The Soviets had a fantastic space program. They had Sputnik. They had Yuri Gagarin. They had the first woman in space. It's no fluke that the craters on the far side of the moon have Russian names. The Russians set numerous spaceflight duration records one cosmonaut lasted 438 straight days in orbit despite the withering effects of weightlessness.
On Mir, the cosmonauts managed to grow wheat. It's possible they did it because they were starving, but it was still a great achievement. The Mir was the site of 23,000 experiments, but the ultimate experiment was its own durability: How long could something like this survive in outer space?
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