Mir Readies For Red-Hot Finale

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 19, 2001 / 2:05 PM EST / CBS

With the Mir space station on the designated low orbit, space officials prepared Wednesday for the delicate job of stabilizing the station - a maneuver essential for the success of its controlled plunge into the South Pacific.

Moscow has taken out $200 million in insurance in case its plans to dump Mir harmlessly in the Pacific go awry.

But from Easter Island to Fiji, residents and governments of the South Pacific micro states were on alert.

Job Esau of the National Disaster Management Office in Vanuatu, a tropical paradise of 182,000 people, said the authorities planned to issue a bulletin on Wednesday night and would hold meetings with community leaders on Thursday.

"The things we are going to look at are keeping ships in harbor, people remaining at home," Esau said.

Who says there's no such thing as a free taco, let alone a free lunch?

The Taco Bell restaurant chain said on Monday it will give a free taco to everyone in the United States if — and this is important — the core of the 150-ton Mir space station hits a floating 40-by-40-foot Taco Bell target placed in the South Pacific.

The space station is supposed to come crashing back to earth sometime this week and Taco Bell says it has created a target, painted with a Bell bull's-eye and bold purple letters stating: "Free Taco Here." The floating target will be placed in the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia in advance of Mir's descent.

Chris Becker, vice president of brand communications for Taco Bell Corp., said "If Mir rings our bell, we will offer a free taco to everyone in the U.S."

—Reuters

Fiji warned its 800,000 people on Tuesday to stay in their houses after Thursday night, not to set out to sea and to avoid any "foreign objects." Japan has issued a similar advisory.

Australia and New Zealand are monitoring the path of Mir and have contingency plans in place, officials said, while airlines would be informed of the space station's position in case they had to reschedule flights across the Pacific.

New Zealand officials are trying to contact a fleet of tuna fishing boats from Western Samoa believed to be in the area.

Built to last only five years, Mir hung on for 15, even outlivinSoviet communism.

But as the Soviet Union disappeared, so did the big budget for the space station. To keep it going, cosmonauts on board became orbiting salesmen, pitching everything from pens to Pepsi.

The commercials didn't raise enough money, and finally Russian space officials decided the station must be dumped because it had grown decrepit and the government simply couldn't come up with the funds to fix and maintain it.

The station lowered to an altitude of 132 miles on Wednesday - the orbit designated as a starting point for the descent process that is to culminate Friday, said Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin.

"The next step will be bringing Mir to a stable position on Thursday," he said.

Mir has been in a slow rolling motion since the end of January as space officials tried to save its unstable batteries and precious fuel for the re-entry. Mission Control officials have acknowledged that switching on its computer-controlled orientation system could be tricky.

In December, Mission Control lost contact with the station for more than 20 hours because the batteries suddenly lost power. Space officials have managed to retain contact with Mir during several subsequent power losses, but each of those incidents disabled its central computer for several days.

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Fearing that Mir's unstable batteries could cause similar glitches, Mission Control experts have worked out a backup - using the onboard computer an separate radio communications of the Progress cargo ship docked at the station.

If Mir's position isn't stabilized, the re-entry process will become uncontrollable.

Space officials voiced confidence that they could carry out a safe descent, pointing to their experience in dumping dozens of Progress ships and other spacecraft into the same area of the Pacific the same way.

But the 143-ton station is by far the heaviest spacecraft ever dumped, and its dimensions and shape make it difficult to exactly predict the re-entry.

Russian space officials said there was no way to track the Mir after it heads down and quickly locate where the debris went.

Veteran Russian cosmonaut Sergey Avdeyev, the only human being to have toasted the New Year three times in orbit and with 747 days in space under his belt, said he felt a great sadness that Mir could not have been kept for posterity as a museum.

"Of course I am very sad. This is a very sorry moment but life is life," Avdeyev told Reuters in a telephone interview from Fiji as he prepared for Mir's funeral fireworks on Friday.

The flight engineer was part of a 48-strong group of scientists, space journalists, cameramen and fee-paying passengers who plan to fly two aircraft from Fiji to within a few 100 miles of Mir's re-entry into the atmosphere.

Film of Mir's final moments should be broadcast a few hours later on the Internet at www.mirreentry.com.