Russia to ditch Mir space station off Australia

The 14-year-old Mir space station will be dumped in February in a controlled descent that will send it hurtling into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.

The 14-year-old Mir space station will be dumped in February in a controlled descent that will send it hurtling into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.

The decision to abandon the ailing space station was taken at a meeting of the Russian Cabinet. Officials have wrestled for months over what to do with the Mir, which Moscow can no longer afford to maintain.

The Cabinet approved a plan to crash the Mir into the Pacific east of Australia sometime around February.

Officials decided to discard the 140-ton station, once a symbol of Soviet space glory, after attempts failed to find private investors to come up with funds to keep it in orbit.

The U.S. space agency NASA has urged Russia to dump the Mir and concentrate its scarce resources on the new international space station, a 16-nation project led by the United States but using some Russian technology developed on Mir.

The Russian government had decided to abandon the Mir earlier this year, but extended its lifetime after the private Netherlands-based MirCorp leased time on Mir and paid for its operation.

MirCorp has pledged to raise more money to keep the station aloft, but the government has grown increasingly skeptical about the company's ability to do so.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Thursday's Cabinet meeting that he considers safely discarding the Mir an international commitment undertaken by the Russian government. "One of our obligations is to ensure the safety of the final stage of the Mir's flight," he said.

In calling for careful preparation for deorbiting the Mir, Mr Koptev recalled a Soviet satellite that crashed into northern Canada in 1978, in a major embarrassment for the Soviet leadership. Nobody was hurt but radioactive fragments were scattered over the wilderness.

The unoccupied U.S. Skylab space station fell to Earth in 1979 when its orbit deteriorated faster than anticipated, scattering debris over western Australia. No one was hurt.

A likely scenario for lowering the Mir's orbit safely involves a cargo ship docking with the station, and then firing rockets to push the station quickly into the atmosphere over an unpopulated area.

Officials have said they may send up a new crew to the Mir in January to prepare the craft for the final descent.

The Mir cluster of six modules, bristling with solar panels and antennas, has far outlived engineers' original expectations.

The inside was damaged by a 1997 fire and one module, Spektr, is sealed off after a collision that year with a small craft ferrying away the station's garbage.