The View from Space: Got a question for Glenn?

In this column:

• Mir-ly wishful thinking
• Evaluating the mission
• Meteor storm in the forecast

(CNN) -- John Glenn has agreed to sit down with CNN for a preflight interview this Friday. I'm going to talk to him about his Mercury astronaut days, his political career, including the ups and downs of being a senator, and his upcoming shuttle mission. If you have questions for NASA's newest and oldest astronaut, e-mail them to me here, and I'll try to fit them into the time we have with Sen. Glenn.

The space shuttle launch and on-orbit team is taking a break for the next few weeks in the wake of the Discovery mission to Mir and before the next flight, Discovery's launch of Glenn into space. There's lots to do to get the shuttle ready for the October 29 launch, including several important pieces of shuttle hardware which failed to operate correctly in space.

Mir-ly wishful thinking

Discovery commander Charlie Precourt has a dream. It's a dream about being able to bring one of Mir's modules back to Earth before the Russian station is abandoned. Precourt says it would be so impressive to have something on Earth that had survived so much in space. He admits there's no way to bring it home but wishes there were.

Andy Thomas came back from Mir, sicker than many of his predecessors on the Russian station. He was too sick on Friday night after landing to be on TV with a NASA interviewer talking about his flight and is now recovering from the return to gravity at his home in Houston. We're following his progress and CNN Medical Correspondent Dan Rutz will be reporting on what its like to return to gravity after four and a half months away.

I talked to astronaut Dave Wolf, who returned from Mir four months ago. He said Thomas looked pretty good when he saw him at the airport Sunday in Houston, where he had just come back from Florida.

Now that Thomas is no longer living on Mir, the Russians have started the process of lowering its orbit. Mir has been flying about 240 miles above the Earth for years, and supply ships have always been used to push it up a little higher.

For the first time since the beginning of the Mir program, a progress supply ship is going to fire its engines Thursday to lower the orbit about four miles. The plan, according to Viktor Blagoff of Russian Mission control, is to gradually lower Mir's orbit until reaches 75 miles above Earth. Then it will be abandoned and allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. The Russians are confident they can steer the big pieces into the Pacific Ocean.

The flight plan proposes to keep Mir in orbit until December 1999, but the head of Energia, the company that operates Mir, has said Russia's cash shortage could force controllers to abandon Mir and send it back to Earth as soon as this fall.

Evaluating the Mir mission

The Russians would like to earn more money from Mir by sending astronauts from other countries, including France, to the station in exchange for millions of dollars in cash.

During the Shuttle-Mir program, NASA paid Russia about the cost of a single shuttle flight to allow astronauts to train with the cosmonauts in Star City and to live aboard Mir for months at a time. Was it worth it?

Shuttle-Mir program manager Frank Culbertson says he thinks so. The lessons learned from the nearly 1,000 days of joint operations on Mir will keep ground-based technicians and designers busy for the next few years. And for the astronauts who went to live on Mir, the lessons are still coming out.

Mike Foale says one thing he learned while living on Mir that should be important to the construction of the new space station is how to deal with excess moisture in the air. When Mir had its power failure after the space wreck, huge pools of water formed on the cold side of the station. Those water pools could have caused short circuits in electronic equipment that kept the station alive.

Foale also told CNN viewers this week that the most important lesson he learned from his time on Mir was not to have vital cables traveling through an open hatch. You'll remember Foale and his cosmonaut colleagues had to disconnect the power cables from the Spekter module to the rest of the station when the module was damaged by an out-of-control Progress supply ship that crashed into it.

Meteor storm in the forecast

Just in case you don't have anything else to worry about, consider this: The Leonid meteor shower on November 17 will provide one of the most impressive nights of stargazing this year. It may also disrupt satellite communication around the world.

The American Astronomical society says that this year's shower will be a storm. There's concern from the operators of the orbiting satellites that help us communicate and predict the weather could be sandblasted by the hundreds of meteors that will hit Earth's atmosphere each second. The Hubble Space telescope is going to be moved so that its safe from the barrage of meteors in November. It should be quite a light show.

Coming up next week: John Glenn's view from space.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.