An American company is selling tickets to sightseers eager to watch the Russian space station Mir plunge to Earth.

Mirreentry.com says it intends to charter an aircraft to fly to within about 322km (200 miles) of Mir's planned dumping ground in the South Pacific.

The station would appear as a large point of light with smaller points of light falling away

Space expert Dr Richard Crowther

Space enthusiasts are being given the chance to sign up for the trip, at a cost of about $6,500.

Experts say the falling spacecraft will look like a giant sparkler in the sky.

Richard Crowther, space consultant at the British National Space Centre, London, UK, said that the amount a passenger might see would depend on the time of Mir's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere and whether it was night or day.

"The station would appear as a large point of light with smaller points of light falling away which are the fragments of the space station as it breaks up and slows from 20,000km per hour to 200km per hour," he told BBC News Online.

'Controlled re-entry'

The expedition is being organised by space professional Bob Citron and his brother Rick.

The pair want to fly about 120 researchers and paying members of the public in a chartered jet to within a few hundred kilometres of the projected track of Mir's descent.

The de-orbiting operation will be co-ordinated at Russia's mission control outside Moscow

They said four senior Mir cosmonauts, one of the designers of the Mir space station, and a Russian space journalist and historian would be among the participants.

Mir, which celebrated its 15th anniversary this week, is due to be de-orbited during the second week of March.

If all goes to plan, the station will burn up over a remote area of the South Pacific.

"It is a controlled re-entry as far as the Russians are concerned," said Dr Crowther. "Assuming they locate the lowest altitude of the orbit over the target area, then the Mir space station and its fragments will not have enough energy to stay in orbit and so they will fall within the target area.

"The risk to the passengers on the plane can be minimised by flying parallel to the ground track of the station over the Earth," he added.