Cosmonauts of Russia, France Return Safely

MOSCOW â€”  A Russian-French space crew returned to Earth safely Monday after a mission that could lengthen the life of the aging Mir space station.

Russian television showed the three cosmonauts being helped from their tiny capsule, which landed on its side on the flat steppes of Kazakhstan. Helpers steered them to chairs set up in the open air and offered them cold drinks.

Russians Alexander Viktorenko and Alexander Kaleri had spent five months on Mir, a station launched by the Soviet Union in 1986. Frenchman Michel Tognini arrived there two weeks ago with a two-man Russian relief crew. Itar-Tass news agency said the cosmonauts were in good spirits after their Soyuz TM-14 spacecraft touched down.

Cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Sergei Avdeyev, who blasted off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur space center with Tognini last month, are due to stay aboard the space station until January.

While the station was manned to capacity during the past two weeks, holding five cosmonauts, the crew removed a panel bearing the hammer-and-sickle state crest of the Soviet Union and fitted an extra maneuvering engine. The engine will help the station maintain a high orbit, away from the Earth’s atmosphere.

They also overhauled other systems and checked radiation levels inside the station.

Experts hope to keep Mir aloft until 1996, when it will probably be destroyed. But the future of the enormously expensive space program, once the pride of the Soviet superpower, is still in question.

Nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Soviet Union’s successor, have agreed on basic funding. But officials are seeking funds from abroad, especially the United States, to support more ambitious projects such as the Russian shuttle Buran.

Buran, similar in shape to the U.S. shuttle, has flown only one, unmanned mission so far and another is planned for next year.