In what could be the last spacewalk from the Mir, Viktor Afanasyev, flight commander, and engineer Sergei Avdeyev venture into open space from the Mir space station Wednesday, July 28, 1999, for a second attempt at fixing a new antenna. "The antenna opened up faultlessly," said a spokeswoman for Mission Control. Left to right identifications not available. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mission control accidentally shuts down MIR's computer

Web posted August 3, 1999

By Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press

MOSCOW -- A Mission Control officer monitoring the Mir accidentally shut down the space station's central computer, prompting the crew to speed up preparations to abandon the orbiter, officials said Monday.

The shutdown on Friday didn't threaten the crew, but did knock the Mir out of alignment with the sun, said Irina Manshilina, a spokeswoman for Mission Control. Mission Control quickly moved to speed up the installation of a new computer that is to control the station after its crew leaves this month.

``Its installation requires unplugging the central computer anyway, so a decision was made to take advantage of the breakdown and do the work earlier than scheduled,'' Manshilina said by telephone.

Viktor Afanasyev, Sergei Avdeyev and Frenchman Jean-Pierre Haignere are scheduled to return to Earth on Aug. 28, leaving the station unmanned until February or March. A final crew will go up briefly to lower the station's orbit, and mission controllers will then send it to burn up in the atmosphere.

Space officials have said that the new computer would allow them to control the station without the crew on board. However, some experts disagree, noting Mir's previous computer glitches and other breakdowns.

When the computer goes down, so does the gyroscope system that keeps the station in the right position to soak up energy from the sun. Computer failures have been frequent over the last few years, and each time it has taken crews several days to fix the problem.

A new antenna floats in space Wednesday, July 28, 1999, following work carried out by Russian cosmonauts Viktor Afasasyev and engineer Sergei Avdeyev.

Without a crew to help, ground controllers might not be able to restart the computer. In that case, Mir's batteries would drain, and the station would spin out of control.

That is what happened to the Mir's predecessor, the Salyut-7. It fell in pieces on a sparsely populated area in Argentina's Andes mountains near the Chilean border in 1991. No injuries or damage resulted.

Space officials have tried to play down the fears of a repeat, saying that a new crew would always be able to promptly blast off for the Mir to fix a problem.

However, the cash-strapped Russian space agency is unlikely to be able to muster a quick rescue mission. Moreover, docking with the Mir would be extremely risky and difficult if the station is out of proper alignment with the sun.

The government has said it doesn't have the money to keep up the Mir, and has promised to spend its scarce resources on the 16-nation international space station, already behind schedule because of Russia's failure to build a key component on time.