Was there a chance to save it? Why was the Mir orbital station sunk anyway

The Mir orbital station became a symbol of Soviet space power and a record holder for the duration of operation in zero gravity. Designed for 5 years of operation, it served for 15 years, but was deorbited in 2001.

This decision still causes controversy: was the destruction of the station inevitable or was there still a chance of salvation?



By the time of the sinking, the facility was a complex organism of seven modules with a total mass of 130 tons. But behind the impressive figures were hidden equally large-scale problems that had accumulated.

By 2000, of the 24 gyrodynes (devices for the station's orientation), only 8 were working. The thermal control system was barely coping - the temperature in the compartments sometimes reached 50 °C. Of the 168 batteries, 40% were completely out of order, and the rest worked intermittently.

At the same time, the financial crisis of the 1990s turned the operation of the station into a constant struggle for survival. Budgetary allocations were cut from about $600 million in 1989 to $6 million in 1991. Attempts to attract foreign investment only briefly delayed the inevitable. Even the agreement with NASA for the Shuttle-Mir program (1993-1998), which brought in $700 million, could not radically improve the situation.

In turn, technical problems worsened with each passing year. In 1997, the cargo ship Progress rammed the module Spektr, damaging the solar panels and causing depressurization. This incident deprived the station of 40% of its energy supply.

A year earlier, a fire caused by a faulty oxygen bomb nearly led to disaster - the flames raged for 14 minutes, filling the compartments with acrid smoke.

By 2000, Mir required $200 million annually to maintain, an unaffordable sum for the Russian space industry, which was also involved in building the ISS. Attempts to find private investors, including a project for an orbital film studio, were unsuccessful.

The last crew spent two months at the station in 2000, troubleshooting, but even their efforts could not restore the facility to its former reliability.

The decision to sink the station was made against the backdrop of alarming forecasts. Calculations showed that by 2003, control over the station could have been completely lost, which created the threat of its uncontrolled fall. To safely deorbit it, the Progress M1-5 cargo ship was used, which in three stages corrected the trajectory of the debris falling into an uninhabited area of ​​the Pacific Ocean.