Mir: Memories and Reflections
The cramped corridors are cold and empty now, but remember much. The docking bays, the food lockers and the thickly scratched windows, they all contain memories from the past decade. So do the heat shields and batteries and tie downs and the millions of other parts that make up Mir, and when she’s destroyed over the Pacific Ocean, those memories will, I hope, be continued here on the green planet that birthed her.
With Mir’s end comes the true closing of an era that bridges many changes, not the least being the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Mir really is a bridge in a very real sense. In 1991, in fact, one cosmonaut left the Earth a Soviet citizen, and returned to Russia with a new nationality, a case of political cultural shock that’s hard to beat.
For the last few days, Mir has been visible to the naked eye as it streaks across the darkening skies on it’s last few orbits to oblivion. And, as endings can be, this is bittersweet for me. On top of just the idea of the end of Mir, it is doubly sad to see the first really successful space station fading into the history books even as the new International Space Station is becoming a reality -- it seems unfair that Mir can’t share, at least for a time, orbit with the newer station.
Mir, in the course of it's 14-year run, has pushed the boundaries of manned space research to wonderful heights all of us can be proud of. Mir is, above all else, one of the good results of the Cold War and the space race that was an intrinsic part of it all.
The moon, our closest neighbor, was the primary goal of the race to be first. And when the last LEM took off for the last command module on December 14, 1972, Apollo 17 came home with a belly full of moon rocks and reams of new scientific data and a government and a people who felt that another mission to the moon was far too expensive. We beat the Russian Bear, didn’t we? Why bother going back?
And so, although the exploration of the lunar surface was over for the time being, thankfully, man's tenure in space was just getting starting in a way that would make those earth to moon junkets seem like the publicity stunts they always in part really were. It would cost the lives, though, of both Americans and Russians.
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