By
The Associated Press
MOSCOW - The Mir space station will be dumped early next year, a senior Cabinet official said yesterday - leaving little hope for the survival of the last symbol of Soviet space glory.
"We are planning to bring the Mir down into the ocean at the end of February," Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said, according to Russian news agencies.
However, Klebanov, who is in charge of space policy in the Cabinet, held out some hope that private funds may still save the nearly 15-year-old Mir. Earlier this year, the station had won a reprieve when the Netherlands-based MirCorp signed a lease agreement and provided some funds to keep it aloft.
"If non-budgetary funds are found, the situation may develop according to a different scenario," Klebanov said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Klebanov's spokeswoman, Oksana Onishchenko, said the official Cabinet decision would be made later, but that the Mir would certainly be brought down. Klebanov was the first Russian official to mention a specific month when the Mir would end its orbit.
MirCorp executives have been in Moscow this month, trying to convince government officials that the Mir should remain in orbit. Jeffrey Manber, president of MirCorp, said the company would try to save the Mir.
"We have cash flow estimates next year of over $100 million. We've demonstrated to the Russian government that we have the capability, if we can get through this crisis now," Manber said.
He said he expected a formal Cabinet decision within two weeks.
MirCorp had recently announced a drive to raise $117 million in a stock offering to refurbish the station and keep it flying. Its plans included sending Santa Monica, Calif., businessman Dennis Tito as a tourist to the station early next year for $20 million.
But Russian space officials have grown increasingly skeptical about MirCorp's ability to raise the money needed to keep the station aloft. MirCorp had said it would finance last week's fuel-supply flight by a Progress cargo ship, but Manber said yesterday that it will be able to come up with the funds only in two to three weeks.
The Mir has been quickly losing altitude since its latest crew left in June, and Russian space officials have said it's necessary to raise the orbit now so that the 130-ton station doesn't fall out of control.
The uncontrollable plunge of the Mir would be a nightmare that Russian space officials need to avoid at all costs, since heavy fragments of the station could conceivably fall on populated areas.
Klebanov said that another Progress with a larger amount of fuel would be launched to the Mir to give it the final impulse to bring it down.
The government has pledged to devote its scarce space funds to the new International Space Station, a 16-nation project led by the United States, and has been under an intense pressure from NASA to dump the Mir.
Russians have been reluctant to part with the Mir. Many officials and cosmonauts voice fears that Russia would play second fiddle to the Americans in the ISS project. ITAR-Tass said yesterday that many of about 80,000 workers involved in the Mir program would lose their jobs if the station is dumped.
