Mir May Not Stay Aloft

The latest plan to keep Russia's Mir space station aloft fell apart Wednesday when officials finally admitted that a British businessman wasn't going to come up with the necessary funds.

After the Russian government said it would abandon Mir in August unless private investors could be found, space officials said Peter Llewellyn had agreed to pay $100 million for a weeklong ride on the 13-year-old station.

Llewellyn said he never planned to pay for the Mir ride, claiming instead that his flight would be a fund-raising effort to help build a children's hospital.

He had a spotty business record and once faced swindling charges in the United States. The accusations were dropped when Llewellyn agreed to pay $41,000 in restitution to a bilked businessman.

Despite Llewellyn's remarks and heavy skepticism from the media, space officials clung to their belief that the 51-year-old British businessman would bail out the Mir. They even brought him to the cosmonaut training center at Russia's space headquarters, Space City, for flight training.

But space officials announced Wednesday that they had finally given up on their latest plan to fund the Mir. Star City chief Gen. Pyotr Klimuk said the decision was prompted by Llewellyn's failure to pay for the flight, the Interfax news agency reported.

If no money is found, the current crew will be the station's last. After the crew departs in August, the 120-ton station would fly unstaffed for about six months until ground controllers lower it into the atmosphere, where most of it will burn up. The rest is expected to fall harmlessly into the ocean.

The government is unlikely to reverse its decision to stop paying for Mir's operation because of a desperate cash shortage and strong pressure from NASA.

NASA wants Russia to commit whatever meager resources it has to a new international space station.