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Sunday Morning News

Mir to Meet End Similar to SkyLab

Aired March 18, 2001 - 10:15 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Space Station Mir has been in orbit now for more than 15 years, logged more than 85,000 orbits and has about 2.2 billion miles on the odometer. And so the Russians say it's time to turn it in, if you will.

Of course, that's easier said than done in the space business. Let me show you where Mir is right now. This is Mir; it is tracking over the middle of the southern Pacific, 145.1 miles in altitude, traveling at 17,500 miles an hour.

Let me take you, fast forward, to when the Russians say they may bring it down. They're saying now it might be the early hours of Friday morning, so I have advanced it to March 23 at the local time, here in Atlanta, when that's going to occur. Essentially, what will happen is Mir will come over the Russian land mass, there. The commands will be sent. The so-called death burn will occur and Mir will come down and begin to enter the atmosphere right in this area, there.

That is the projected zone where the debris pieces will come down, perhaps as much as 20 tons worth of Mir, 1,500 separate pieces. It's a tricky operation. Nothing this big has ever been brought back to earth before in a controlled manner. If they overshoot, Chile could become a target of some of Mir's debris. If there is a real problem, the orbit actually takes it right up into Europe.

So, this is something we will obviously be watching very closely. One of the ways to watch it is through our CNN Web site. We have a very comprehensive ability to track Mir and what is going to happen to it. We have this shock wave capability of showing you what exactly will happen to Mir as it goes in. We have a 3-D model which will help you understand what the station looks like, kind of like a turnstile, if you will. And there you see it turning. And there's the main page at CNN.com/Mir.

Another good place to go is this site. This is www.aero.org. This is the Aerospace Corporation. They have a great site explaining all about orbital debris, and in particular the final days of Mir. Some good sites to go for some animation and things that will make it easier for you to understand what is going to happen.

Now, more than 20 years ago another space station was coming to earth in an uncontrolled fashion. That was a U.S. space station called SkyLab. When it was launched, there was no plan to bring it back in a controlled manner.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: SkyLab, we read you loud and clear.

O'BRIEN (voice-over): SkyLab, the first and only American space station, was an afterthought, a clever cobbling of leftover pieces from Apollo. The spacious living quarters was a converted booster of one of the mighty Saturn V rockets, designed to carry men to the moon.

GLYNN LUNNEY, FORMER NASA FLIGHT DIRECTOR: In many respects, it was significantly ahead of it's time, I mean, in terms of volume and power and the kind of instruments that we had onboard. This was a very sophisticated platform that we sent three crews to.

O'BRIEN: Three crews of three spent a total of 171 days aboard the outpost in 1973 and '74. They studied the sun, gazed at the earth, blew bubbles, and became Guinea pigs for a raft of rigorous medical experiments.

CHRIS KRAFT, FORMER NASA FLIGHT DIRECTOR: Everything you can talk about, it was done to look at mans response to long periods of being in space, and I think it was superb. It was done superb. I don't think anything has come close to it since.

DICK SMITH, FORMER NASA ADMINISTRATOR: We learned, I think, more about the input/output of a human being than we ever knew before.

O'BRIEN: But what a tangled web this space agency had woven.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The spider appears to adapt relatively well to zero G.

O'BRIEN: Because not only was SkyLab's creation an afterthought, so was it's demise. There was no plan to bring down the 200,000 pound outpost in a controlled manner. Advanced as it was, SkyLab was not equipped with the engines and fuel to guide it through a precise reentry, and NASA did not have a space tug that it could send to do the job. SkyLab was destined to return to earth uncontrolled.

SMITH: I think it was not irresponsible. It was a first step. The risk was looked at initially, and the risk was very, very low. And therefore, it was considered an acceptable risk for the science we were getting out of it.

O'BRIEN: Many NASA engineers hoped the new space shuttle would be ready to save the day, but SkyLab was dropping faster than expected and by 1979 the abandoned station was on the precipice and the word spread fast.

SMITH: It started getting a lot of publicity. People were talking about Chicken Little, the sky is falling.

O'BRIEN: Dick Smith led NASA's efforts to try and stave off disaster. He and his team watched in horror on July 11, 1979 when SkyLab began it's final plunge. SMITH: We saw it was coming in on a track up over the, basically over Seattle, up over Canada, and back across the New York area, and that if we tumbled it, it should, we thought, would carry it into the South Atlantic ocean.

O'BRIEN: Commanding the station to tumble did extend it's flight, but a lot farther than the NASA team expected. SkyLab overshot the Atlantic and, in a matter of minutes, offered this light show as it hit the atmosphere over the Western Outback of Australia.

Several pieces struck the surface. The only thing hurt, NASA's pride.

LUNNEY: In retrospect, I think we should design these things with the capability to bring them down. Because they're finite in life and even if it's not technical, there will be reasons why a platform like that would want to be deorbited at sometime.

O'BRIEN: So, even as NASA and it's international partners build their brand new space station, Alpha, there is a detailed plan to safely deep-six the outpost when it's days are over. It's modeled after the Russian effort to bring down Mir.

There won't be another SkyLab. The space station afterthought has led to a lot more forethought.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: The question is, will all the plans work? As we look at Mir right now, the Russians do have a plan in place to fire some rockets on an unmanned tanker which docked there back in January. The idea is to slow Mir down just at the right time at the precise amount of speed loss to bring it into that zone here where they'd like to put it. But nothing this big has ever been deorbited in a controlled manner, and so we will be watching this very closely.

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