Russian Space

The United States and Russia have agreed on a joint space station project that might get NASA off the hook once again, despite its latest setback with the Mars Observer.Big science is a big target for budget-cutters on Capitol Hill. The super-collider was rejected in the House and is fighting for survival in the Senate. The Space Station Freedom just made it through the House and faces its Senate test after the disappearance of the Mars spacecraft. By linking up with the Russians in a deal unimaginable during the Cold War, the Clinton administration has added two foreign-policy pluses to its case for the $19 billion space station.

NEW YORK - Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google Inc. to organize all the information on Earth, has now turned his gaze to space. Brin slapped down a $5 million deposit so he can blast off to orbit, Space Adventures Ltd. said yesterday. Brin becomes the highest-profile customer to date for the private space travel company, which since 2001 has sent five wealthy clients to the International Space Station aboard Russian rockets. Each ticket cost $20 million or more, a price that's climbing.

HERNDON, VA. -- Attention, shoppers!Want to buy the most powerful booster rocket ever built, a 20-story behemoth that could toss five tractor-trailers into orbit? Have at least $15 million to spare for a round-trip ticket to Mir, Earth's only space station and zero-gravity resort?Well, Jeff Manber and Chris Faranetta are the guys to see.They are vice presidents and salesmen for Energia USA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NPO Energia of Kaliningrad, the design arm of the former Soviet Union's ambitious space empire.

Russian cosmonauts restored several key computers aboard the International Space Station yesterday, resolving a problem that had bedeviled flight and ground crews from the U.S. and Russia for four days. Still, the orbiting craft's Russian-operated computer system - apparently knocked out by a power glitch when an American solar panel array was connected this week - reminded the world that the lofty ambitions of manned space exploration can rise or fall on technology as mundane as a power cable or a software malfunction.

THE INDEPENDENCE DAY landing on Mars of the U.S. spacecraft Pathfinder signifies not only how far the American space program has come, but the depths to which the once-superior Russian program has fallen. This accomplishment was supposed to be shared with the people who awed Americans 40 years ago by launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. The Russians' Mars 96 probe was supposed to land on Mars, too, two months from now. But it crashed only hours after takeoff last November.There has been a litany of problems in the Russian space program since then, including costly delays in constructing its portion of the international space station -- a module that is supposed to be launched next year.

APRIL HAS been a tough month for Russian space scientists. They celebrated the 36th anniversary of the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) while acknowledging they work in a shadow of the program that accomplished that feat. Once proud of the envy their dominance in space exploration caused, Russians now cross their fingers the U.S. Congress won't cut their life line.It appears that won't happen. The House Science Committee has voted to continue funding of the space station, a joint venture whose construction has been delayed nearly a year because of the Russians.

HOUSTON -- As Atlantis' astronauts sailed past the halfway point of their visit to Russia's space station yesterday, ground control teams considered a request from Mir's cosmonauts to dispose of potentially contaminated water and other refuse that have accumulated aboard the 11-year-old outpost.The surprise request was perhaps one of the least glamorous examples of how the Russians, with their orbital space station, and the United States, with its space shuttle, are learning to work together.

MOSCOW -- The crash Sunday of Russia's rocket to Mars was the latest sign of the humiliation that's become routine for this country's space program.A Burran space shuttle, part of a fleet that never got the funding to fly, is now an attraction for children at Gorky Park. Cosmonauts aboard the old Mir space station routinely must wait for the homeland to afford a flight home, and just a few weeks ago they had to suffer the stench of an overflowing sewage system.But Sunday's failure of the ambitious Russian Mars 96 mission was the most serious blow to the Russian space program since the fall of the Soviet Union.

MOSCOW -- The technicians and cosmonauts working in Russia's once-glorious space program were laboring in obscurity a week ago, ignored by the world they had once astonished. Today, the fate of the $100 billion International Space Station, and the three crew members aboard, depends on those same scientists and engineers, working to figure out how to keep the station in orbit and the crew alive during the months to come. "Every section of our organization, every department knows what should be done in an emergency such as this," said Aleksandr Aleksandrov, chief of flight testing services for Energia, the government-controlled company that runs Russia's manned space programs.

PARIS -- All manner of creatures, from monkeys to salamanders, have followed Laika the dog into orbit since 1957, while hundreds of men have succeeded Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut -- but only a handful of women have made it into space in the Russian program.It may seem strange that whatever giant leaps women have made in earthbound commerce and industry in the 33 years since Valentina Tereshkova became the first female cosmonaut, the Russian space program has remained largely the domain of men.Only a few years ago a Russian commander, whose crew included Britain's first astronaut -- a woman -- was quoted as saying: "It's not a woman's business to fly into space."

MOSCOW - At a time when American manned missions have been suspended because of design flaws in the space shuttle, Russian authorities want to spin past the moon with a humble vehicle now serving as NASA's space taxi. Not only are Russian officials planning their nation's first lunar fly-by, according to Russian media reports, but they hope to make the mission at least partly self-financing by selling a seat aboard the venerable Soyuz spacecraft for $100 million. Where the shuttle is like a winged, spacious space SUV, Russia's Soyuz is an insect-like three-seater compact based on a 1960s design.

MOSCOW - Fearing that the international space station might have to be left in orbit without a crew, the Russian government yesterday accelerated funding to build space vehicles. Yuri Koptev, director of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, told reporters that the Russian Cabinet has approved the early release of $38 million that was budgeted for the second half of the year. The government also tentatively promised to increase the agency's budget to $240 million next year from $130 million this year, he said.

MOSCOW -- The technicians and cosmonauts working in Russia's once-glorious space program were laboring in obscurity a week ago, ignored by the world they had once astonished. Today, the fate of the $100 billion International Space Station, and the three crew members aboard, depends on those same scientists and engineers, working to figure out how to keep the station in orbit and the crew alive during the months to come. "Every section of our organization, every department knows what should be done in an emergency such as this," said Aleksandr Aleksandrov, chief of flight testing services for Energia, the government-controlled company that runs Russia's manned space programs.

MOSCOW - Two Americans and a Russian aboard the International Space Station may be stuck there two months longer than planned after Saturday's shuttle disaster, a Russian space official said yesterday. NASA astronauts Kenneth D. Bowersox and Donald R. Pettit, along with Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, flew to the station in November and were scheduled to return next month. But Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for Rosaviakosmos, the Russian space agency, said now the three may have to stay in orbit until May. "The final decision will be taken after specialists calculate exactly how much time stocks of food, oxygen and fuel will last," Gorbunov told the Itar-Tass news agency yesterday.

As of yesterday, pop star Lance Bass was a man without a mission. Fed up Russian space officials said Bass and the consortium backing his flight to the International Space Station hadn't paid up, so he can no longer train in Star City, Russia, for the Oct. 27 mission. Hollywood handlers for Bass, a singer with the boy band 'N Sync, said they still were negotiating and hadn't given up making him the world's youngest person in space. Television producer David Krieff of Destiny Productions had landed commitments from sponsors such as Radio Shack and had planned a television show about the trip.

MOSCOW - That was some symbol that went streaking through the sky over Fiji yesterday, breaking up into pieces and sizzling into the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean. The Mir space station went up as a symbol, and it came down as a symbol. In between it came to stand for perseverance, if nothing more. Perseverance by an intrepid series of cosmonauts and ground crews in the face of fire, collision, leaking air, collapsing finances, cultural conflict and personality clash. To the very end, there were Russians who wanted to keep Mir going as a manifestation of Russian prowess.

MOSCOW - Two Americans and a Russian aboard the International Space Station may be stuck there two months longer than planned after Saturday's shuttle disaster, a Russian space official said yesterday. NASA astronauts Kenneth D. Bowersox and Donald R. Pettit, along with Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, flew to the station in November and were scheduled to return next month. But Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for Rosaviakosmos, the Russian space agency, said now the three may have to stay in orbit until May. "The final decision will be taken after specialists calculate exactly how much time stocks of food, oxygen and fuel will last," Gorbunov told the Itar-Tass news agency yesterday.

SPACE AGENCY Director Daniel S. Goldin made the right decision in letting another U.S. astronaut spend a few months aboard Russian space station Mir. But he will be severely second-guessed if something goes wrong. And it could.Mr. Goldin is not taking this situation lightly. The NASA executive has done as much as he can to assure that the Russians make Mir as safe as possible. But the unexpected is always part of space flight.And Mir has had more than its share of unexpected maladies, a breakdown of varying degrees every two days by some calculations.

KOROLYOV, Russia -- The Mir space station streaked back to Earth early 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. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled splashdown, Russian officials announced that a U.S. 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.

Sometime this week, the wispy atmosphere 68 miles above the Earth will begin to bend back the fragile solar panels on the Russian space station Mir - gently at first, like a dog's ears in the wind. But then it will rip them off, and break the obsolete, 148-ton Mir station into a formation of 1,500 white-hot, aluminum and titanium meteors. Whatever doesn't burn up or melt will be hell-bent for a deep-ocean grave in the remote southeastern Pacific. That's if the Russians' plans to ditch Mir go as advertised.