Space ‘Mechanics’ on Mir Take a Look Under the Hood

MOSCOW —  The crew of the Mir space station spent a low-key Friday showing two Russian colleagues, who had arrived from Earth the previous evening, how their accident-prone new home works.

The weary current crew--cosmonauts Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin and NASA astronaut Michael Foale--has endured months of problems, including a collision with an unmanned cargo craft in June that damaged the Russian station.

Tsibliyev and Lazutkin will return to Russia next week, leaving behind a station with a broken oxygen generator, a serious power shortage, a defective docking system and a punctured shell.

After a tense manual docking Thursday that ended in a relieved welcome on board for replacements Anatoly Solovev and Pavel Vinogradov, all five men were allowed to sleep an extra four hours and enjoy a leisurely breakfast Friday.

“Then they inspected the station together and drilled for a possible emergency evacuation, and for the hand-over from one team to the next,” said Valery Lyndin, a spokesman at Mission Control north of Moscow.

“Tsibliyev also spent two hours explaining to Solovev how to prepare for a spacewalk,” he said, adding that the crew members then exercised and carried on with the scientific experiments they have been doing.

One of Mir’s half a dozen modules, Spektr, was punctured in the June 25 collision and has been sealed off to prevent oxygen from rushing out of the whole station. Initial plans for the old team to attempt repairs were called off after Tsibliyev began suffering stress-related heart problems.

The newcomers are slated to venture into the airless Spektr module Aug. 20 to try to reconnect power cables severed when the research pod was sealed off.

Successful repairs would mean a new lease on life for Mir, which has been functioning on half its power since the connection was lost with Spektr’s state-of-the-art solar panels.

Among the station’s problems, the station’s oxygen generator, which has a worn-out pipe, is not working, and the crew is breathing oxygen generated by canisters known as candles. Lyndin said that each astronaut needs one candle a day to exercise and work efficiently and that there are enough canisters on board to last 2 1/2 months.

Lyndin said the crew will decide whether the malfunctioning oxygen equipment can be repaired during the Aug. 20 spacewalk. If it cannot be, the repair will have to wait until the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis reaches Mir in late September with a replacement pipe.

Mir, which was designed to last five years but is now 11 years old, will be replaced at the turn of the century by an international space station. On Friday, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin made a morale-boosting trip to the Khrunichev space center in Moscow, where Russian elements of that station are being built.

Mindful of U.S. criticism that Russia’s financial woes have caused delays on the new station, Yeltsin told his Finance Ministry to borrow the next $100 million in funding of the $261 million that he promised in April, enough to keep the international project on track.

“Now all the financial issues have been resolved,” he said. A relieved Yuri N. Koptev, the director of the Russian Space Agency, agreed that the funding will be enough to meet the 1997 schedule for building the new station. Russia is to build the first two elements, which will be joined by modules built by the United States, Japan and a European consortium.

Although Western colleagues were “very worried over the slow progress in the construction of the space station’s Russian segment,” Koptev said, work has advanced significantly since Yeltsin intervened in April to help things along.

The international station is due to go into operation in early 1999. Then the Russian Space Agency will have to decide what to do with Mir, which space officials here say could, in theory, keep working until early next century.

The two Russian cosmonauts who return to Earth next week will face less than a hero’s welcome from their bosses. Yeltsin said Tsibliyev and Lazutkin will be questioned about the series of accidents that befell Mir while they were aboard.

Clearly impressed by the expertise on display at Khrunichev, the president seemed reluctant to believe that machines, and not men, could have been at fault on Mir.

“There will be discussions with them to work out what happened, because, at first sight, according to the experts, it was not a technical fault. Evidently . . . the human factor played a part here,” the president said.