Moscow — Leaving behind its early days of secrecy and its final days of ignominy, Russia's Mir space station went out Friday in glory, blazing to a public, fiery and harmless death over the Pacific Ocean.
As it had while battling a series of near-disasters in space, Mir captured the world's attention with a re-entry that even Russian officials acknowledged had the potential to go very, very wrong. Instead, it went flawlessly.
Guided by practiced hands at Mission Control outside Moscow, Mir broke from its orbit early Friday with a 20-minute burst of its engines that changed the station's trajectory and spelled its doom.
The nearly 140-ton Mir crashed into Earth's atmosphere, breaking apart and burning up.
Chunks that survived, some of them huge, gave onlookers in the South Pacific islands of Fiji a fireworks show they will likely never forget.
"We saw five or six fragments with a huge smoke trail that lasted for 10 to 15 seconds ... followed some time later by a couple of sonic booms," said Reuters photographer Mark Baker. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
The 20 tons of debris landed smack on target in a space junk cemetery of the Pacific, about 1,800 miles southwest of Britain's Pitcairn Islands.
"It occurred in the exact area that the Russian space agency had predicted, between Australia and Chile," said David Templeman, a civil defense official from Australia, one of several countries in Mir's potential flight path. "I'm relieved."
Russian officials hailed the operation as a triumphant end to Mir's 15-year mission. Not only did the Russians prove what they had been saying all along that Mir hysteria was ridiculous but they also burnished the image of a remarkable flying machine that had become the punch line of numerous jokes.
"Mir proved Russia cannot just build things but can operate them too," said Yuri Koptev, chief of the Russian Space Agency.
"Russia is and will remain a space power."
As it had for most of its life, Mir set standards even in its fiery death.
American and European officials now working with the Russians on the international space station will some day benefit from Mir's latest, and last, experience. The station is based in large part on the Mir model.
"We want to show the world today that we could still do things well," said Alexander Lazutkin, a former Mir cosmonaut who was one of more than 500 people who crammed into Mission Control to bid the station goodbye.
"For 15 years Mir did a lot of important work, not only for us, but for the whole world."
Russian cosmonauts and scientists believed that despite its age and history of troubles, Mir had useful years left.
Backed by opinion polls, politicians lobbied the Kremlin to save the space station, saying it was important for Russia's prestige, scientific community and even national defense.
But the cosmonauts grew to understand that the strapped Russian government was no longer going to fund even the bare minimum, about $100 million a year, needed to keep the station alive.
Nor would the West. NASA and its international partners had long ago urged Russia to dump Mir and turn its full attention to the International space station.
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