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Mir Repairs Delayed to Next Crew
Citing fatigue and stress for the three-man crew of the Russian space station Mir, Russian officials decided July 21 to delay repairs scheduled for the damaged space station until a relief crew arrives at the station early this month.
![[image of Mir crew]](../9708/images2/mircrew.jpg)
The decision came four days after one of the current crew members accidentally disconnected a computer cable while preparing for upcoming repairs. The disconnected cable shut down the attitude system, forcing the crew to retreat to the safety of their Soyuz spacecraft as the station lost power.
Russian Mir commander Vasily Tsibliev, flight engineer Alexander Lazutkin, and American astronaut Michael Foale used the thrusters on the Soyuz module to control the attitude of the station so that the solar panels could generate electricity again, providing power to other systems on the station. It took more than a day for the situation to return to conditions before the mishap.
The incident, combined with a heart condition Tsibliev reported just a few days before, was enough for Russian mission controllers. "It was decided to hand over the repairs to the next crew," said deputy mission controller Igor Goncharov. "The repairs will be undertaken after the present crew leaves on August 14."
Cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyov and Pavel Vinogradov are scheduled for launch on August 5, and should arrive at Mir two days later. Tsibliev and Lazutkin will leave the station on the 14th; Foale will stay on Mir until the next shuttle docking mission in late September.
Solovyov and Vinogradov will start repairs to Mir around August 18-20. They will replace the current hatch that seals the Spektr module from the rest of the station with a new one that has connectors so that electricity generated by the three working solar panels on the module can be used throughout the station.
Foale, who had been tapped to replace Tsibliev in the spacewalks had they taken place in July, is not scheduled to participate in the August spacewalks, but will be able to assist.
Russian officials have also talked of conducting future spacewalks to seal the hole in the Spektr module, allowing it to be repressurized and used again. A member of the Kremlin Defense Council told Reuters of an unspecified "new and unique technology" the crew will use to repair the module.
The decision also temporarily grounds French guest cosmonaut Leopold Eyharts. Russian and French officials decided to keep Eyharts off the August mission, where he would have spent three weeks on Mir, because of the lack of power available for conducting experiments.
Eyharts has been rescheduled for a flight early next year.