New role for the Mir

THOUGH THE MOVE to make use of the Mir as a platform for building the International Space Station aims at giving it a new role, it is not surprising that it has made the Russians unhappy since it looks like the assigning of a secondary place to it. The Mir has undoubtedly made history with its having housed astronauts for prolonged stay in space. The end of the Cold War helped towards making it accessible to the U.S. astronauts and imparted a quantum leap for cosmic research by enabling observation and studies from a vantage point in space. A 15-year presence of the Mir in space is truly a remarkable achievement by the scientists, engineers and technicians who had prolonged its duration by as long as three times the five years earlier anticipated for it. This, however, would not have been possible but for the support which the U.S. had given for keeping the Mir aloft in space for so long. Had it not been for such support, the Russians would have had no choice but to dump the Mir.

The Mir had indeed been making history both for itself as well as for the other space agencies which were seeking it out for a variety of purposes. Earlier this year, Progress M-15, a Russian spacecraft, docked with it for unloading 2.7 tonnes of fuel. There was another docking by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The agreement signed with the U.S. for the sending of its astronauts to the Mir kept the Russian space station alive for as long as eight years. It has, however, not pleased the Russians at having to seek U.S. funding for the Mir because of the severe financial constraints which Moscow had to reckon with while having to sustain it in space. They also suspect that the assignment given to the Holland-based Mircorp for saving the Mir to make use of it as a space platform is a deliberate U.S. move to ensure for itself a space supremacy which could have been challenged if Moscow could have kept the Mir going without having to seek Washington's support.

The Russian discomfiture over the U.S. wresting a role for itself in keeping the Mir in orbit should focus attention on the huge expenditures which space programmes require. Having to make the Mir henceforth a part of the International Space Station, a sixteen-nation endeavour, demonstrates how difficult it is for one country to mobilise the resources for such a financially strenuous task. It is, however, another matter that the U.S. will make itself the dominant partner in the programme as the Russians suspect it will. If the Russians are sore at having been forced by the predicament in which the Mir found itself, it should be only because of their having to reconcile themselves to just being a partner in a prestigious space programme in which they had earlier been in the lead. It should, however, be realised that but for such internationalisation, resulting from the crumbling of the Mir brought about by Moscow's financial stringency, the world would have lost a magnificent space laboratory which the Russians had built for study of the sprawling cosmos. It is very much in the larger international interests that there is no exclusiveness in space programmes. Such monopolisation in other areas has extracted a heavy price already.

Space literature has drawn attention to the inevitability of space programmes having to be shared by a number of nations not merely because of their becoming prohibitively expensive for just one country but also in view of the gains from enlarged international cooperation. This was emphasised by Sir Arthur Clarke in a science fiction piece on the presence in a space flight of a Russian botanist who was jeered at because of his seeming irrelevance until those mocking at him stayed long enough to see the vital role he could play in the programme.

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