WEEKLY WHINE

What makes Mir so great

Last week, Cosmonauts Sergei Zaletin and Aleksandr Kaleri headed to Russia's space station Mir, reopening it after more than seven months. The station had been uninhabited since FRI 27 AUG 1999 as Russia ran out of money to fund the station. But MirCorp was assembled in JAN 2000 to allow Mir's mission to continue, this time with fully private money. Future crews will perform commercial experiments.

But what is the point? Why bother with a fourteen year old space station when the International Space Station is under construction? [Well, sort of.] There are plenty of reasons. Here are some.

	It gets occasional orbital boosts from a Progress module's engine
	Priroda module studies Earth throughout the day
	Cables and pipes running all over the place: Now that's a space station
	You get to fly a Soyuz capsule to get there
	Air leaks? It's a good fixer-upper
	It's in space!
	Mir rhymes with "cheer", "here", "spear", "clear", "year", "peer", "pier", "near", "veer", "tear", and "deer"
	It looks really cool from orbit
	Zaletin and Kaleri get to sleep from 04:00 to 12:00 PDT
	Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov stayed there for 365 days in 1987-8
	Valery Polyakov stayed there for 437 days in 1994-5
	How much had you accomplished when you were fourteen?
	Modules have been added frequently
	Zaletin and Kaleri celebrated Cosmonautics Day on WED 12 APR 2000
	Mir means "peace", but International Space Station just means "international space station"
	Thirty different crews have now been there - no other spacecraft has supported that many