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Mir Space Station Sizzles to Ending Over Pacific

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March 23, 2001, Section A, Page 1Buy Reprints
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The Mir space station streaked back to Earth today as a molten blaze of metal and fire, harmlessly raking a swath of the South Pacific like a load of cosmic buckshot.

The controlled descent, which ended Mir's 15-year-career as an orbiting laboratory for Soviet and then Russian science, was managed with remarkable precision by the Russian space agency at Mission Control here near Moscow. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled splashdown, Russian officials announced that an American ground station on Guam had confirmed that Mir was descending through the atmosphere according to plan, following a final burn of its retro-rocket system.

Just before 9 a.m. Moscow Time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time) Mir was reported to have crashed into the ocean about 1,800 miles east of New Zealand.

Witnesses on Fiji reported a spectacular display of gold and silver lights streaming across the sky.

Five hours earlier, mission controllers waited almost breathlessly as the unmanned supply ship docked to Mir fired its engines successfully for 14 minutes. That was the first of three burns that started Mir's controlled descent.

When the engine-firing sequence ended, Mikhail L. Pronin, the 51-year-old chief engineer of the Russian space agency, said, ''If I were not at work, I would be drinking at this moment.''

The engine burn began as Mir passed over the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas; it ended as the space station flew over Beijing.

Mr. Pronin, a barrel-chested man who has worked on Mir since it was launched in 1986, showed an intense determination to bring it to a dignified rest without a hitch.

''We are in a working mood,'' he said, adding, ''Tomorrow there will be time for reminiscences.''

But the all-night vigil was not without light moments. When the giant television screens here showing the live telemetry from Mir during the engine burn began flickering with static and interference, Mr. Pronin joked that the Chinese, aware that Mir was flying overhead, were jamming its signal. China's space agency is the only one in the world, Mr. Pronin said, that does not have live communication links with the Russian space agency.

From airborne observation planes, on television and on the Internet, people around the world stood by to catch a glimpse of the artificial meteor shower that the 134-ton laboratory promised to deliver as it streaked at 18,000 miles an hour through the last of 86,330 orbits made since the Soviets launched it 15 years ago.

Fired into the cosmos by a nation that no longer exists, Mir was much lamented, shouldered by many Russians today as a reminder of glories lost -- and not fully replaced by Russia's role in the International Space Station with the United States and 14 other nations.

''I am especially sad these days,'' Anatoly Solovyov, a Russian astronaut who spent 651 days on Mir during 5 missions, told an interviewer Wednesday. ''An entire era of our Soviet space program is ending, into which we invested not only our money but, what is more important, our intellectual potential.''

Aleksandr Kaleri, 44, who spent 415 days aboard Mir, said this week that he saw a loss of Russia's national prestige in the loss of Mir.

''To have one's own space program is one of the characteristics of a strong state,'' he told The Moscow Times. ''While we have the Mir, we are still a great power, but once we lose it, we will slip away from the club of strong nations.''

Though Mir's demise was intended to parallel a new era of international cooperation in space, especially between Russia and the United States, the Bush administration's decision today to announce the expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats injected a note of uncertainty about the future.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who oversees Russia's still vast military and space industries, seemed to offer Russians some hope today that they could stage a comeback in space, saying his country's extensive involvement in building the International Space Station would make it possible to build a Mir-2 in about 15 years. After all the efforts to save the first Mir by turning it into a movie set, a tourist lodge or the venue for the American television series ''Survivor,'' Gennadi Strekalov, who twice flew on the space station, said the rescue efforts had been too late and too poorly organized.

''This is like a situation when someone is sick and one doctor says he should be treated like this, then a second doctor says like that, and a third wants to treat him differently,'' Mr. Strekalov said in a radio interview today. ''But then a conference gathers and it's already too late to treat him.'', 'Forgive us, Mir station, but we couldn't do anything.' ''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Mir Space Station Sizzles to Ending Over Pacific. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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