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Space Science

Mir To Crash Into Pacific 188

Posted by Hemos from the what-goes-up-must-come-down dept.
b0z writes "According to an article on Yahoo! the Russians are planning to dump Mir into the ocean in February. According to the article, the $40 million that MirCorp has raised is not enough to save Mir. Also, it is noted that Mir has been in use much longer than the engineers that made it intended." Of course, I'll believe this when I "see" it - the saga of Mir continues.
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Mir To Crash Into Pacific More

Mir To Crash Into Pacific

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  • On vacation in Hawaii... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    will be Kenny McCormick.

    And Halloween is coming.

    (You better look up, kid!)
  • you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...

    No, you haven't take any thermo or bio classes.

    Note the volume of water in the ocean. Note mass of space station. Note delta T when station hits water.

    Obviously, if there happens to be any sea life around where Mir hits, its not going to be around for long. But we're talking about the middle of the Pacific Ocean here. The concentration of life is not high. The amount of life killed or affected by Mir's landing will be low. Mir will have no lasting effect on the surrounding ocean. Any temperature elevation will be unnoticeable after a few days, probably a few hours.

    As for warm water from factories effecting ecosystems:
    In those cases, we are talking about lots of warm water, over a long time, into rather shallow and confined bays with high concentrations of life. Big difference.

  • ... and have them think we're back in the dark ages?

    "My $DEITY z234asdfat, look at what they live in! Lets avoid that solar system!"

    or alternatively

    "Shooting space junk is no test of a true warrior!"[1]

    [1] Star Trek V reference
  • Assuming we trust Russian electronics (tubes anyone?) to properly calculate the correct trajectory to drop it into the ocean and not NYC or Paris (well, paris anyway <g> ).

  • I hope you don't call yourself a geek too. If you were a geek you'd remember skylab, and the big chunks of it that landed on australia.
  • If they just leave it to die, it will die by falling to earth on it's own. Better that they aim it away from land then let it fall wherever it happens to fall.
  • What he needs to read is a physics book. The cost of launching something the size of mir out of earth orbit would make even the biggest environmentalist say "just drop the fucker in the ocean."
  • Ill pay a million pesos to shoot down Mir with a high powered missle. It would be a lot cooler than just sinking the poor moldy basterd into the ocean.

    That might make a nice light show, until the millions of little pieces that are left whizzing around in orbit start taking out satellites...

    Anyway how much damage can something that big can do on impact?

    None, unless they are WAY off target. The pacific ocean isn't exactly a small target.
  • so we all have read about the space fungis that is munch munching away on the mir. As some of this lucious fungi is inside the mir (ie cosomonauts said they don't want reach into certain places) it seems that some will survive the re-rntry process.

    Is anyone else the least bit concerned that we are bring back some uber fungis to earth.

    I can see in a few decades the earth slowly being munched up.

    msew
  • Actually, most people thought that the earth flyby of the Cassini [nasa.gov] probe was the object of Nostradamus' prophecy [inet-one.com].
  • One Microsoft Way - Redmond VA

    I pity whoever in Virginia has this address ...

    I don't. C'mon, who builds a house at "One Microsoft Way"? It's like living on "Ethnic Cleansing Avenue"; you have to be expecting enraged mobs with torches and pitchforks at your front door eventually anyways.
  • Or, perhaps, Atari.
  • ashes to ashes, crust to crust ;-)
    ___
  • Shouldn't you be quoting Reuters, the original source of the article, rather than Yahoo! which regularly runs their content? Here is the original link to the story:

    http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=s cience&Repository=SCIENCE_REP&RepositorySt oryID=%2Fnews%2FIDS%2FScience%2FSCIENCE-SPACE-MIR- DC_TXT.XML
  • Don't you mean "since the 1802 [ox.ac.uk]"?
  • One question though? Is dumping a fungi/mold harvesting ground of that size into the ocean really such a good idea? Wouldn't it be better to destroy the thing in space or whatnot, so none of the perhaps mutated and strange molds end up in our oceans? Or maybe we should add this to that list of ways for the world to end... ;)

  • The USSR was not a third world country, by any streach of the imagination.
  • >Any hints as to what the
    >outcome of all this will be?

    A humongous fungus among us.
  • Damn my eyes!

    When I first read the title I saw:

    "Mir to crash into Public!"

    I suppose that would be a showstopper for one of the FOX disaster shows...
  • Mir's time has come and gone, and come, and gone again, ad nausium....

    The thing is *infested* with fungus! It's old and crotchety and my goddess, can you imagine the insurance waivers those NBC survior participants would have to sign? Heck, they would have to decimate a small forest just for the paper required to print it on!
    *truck pulls in*
    *beep, beep, beep*
    "back it on up here! just drop it off here in the front yard and go back for the second load!"
    "Mister Swihiggens, We'll need you to sign a few forms of course.. standard stuff really.."

    I'm glad they at least came up with enough money to bring it down safely...

    ISTR reading comics many moons ago, about MIR coming down on our heads... not so funny when it became possible.
  • Salvage rights usually go to the first person/company that can bring an object from the wreck to the surface. Governments supercede this sometimes, though. For example, the US Navy and US Air Force still claim ownership of all sunken aircraft. The Air Force is a little more forgiving, but the Navy will take whatever aircraft you raise from the bottom. If you don't notify them, raise a wreck, restore it, and then they find out--too bad. They'll take the plane and you'll be out all that $.

    Even if the Russian Government doesn't exercise whatever rights they have on the wreck you can be sure that there will be a LOT of salvage boats in the general area of the return point in February, ready to move in as soon as possible.

  • Actually, it could be fun:

    The opportunity of a lifetime: Mission to Mir... one way ticket. You go up in our shuttle, you come down in Mir. ;) OR, you could say (after the winner is up there of course) congrats for winning your very own de-orbiting space station.

    Even better: Mir Survivor. send nine morons to populate Mir. Whom ever survives the impact wins.

    Anything for a TV show I guess ;)
  • Long live the next generation of <a href="http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/index-n.html">sh oddily-produced lowest bidder space hardware!</a>
  • Oh, THAT html formatting button...
  • I got a great idea, why don't they give ME the 40 million and we can plan a destination "my apartment." I'll setup an obsticle course and give away fabulous prizes, like old chinese food, and that cup 'o yogurt that's been in the fridge for 6 months, it's got it's own space fungus. I've even got a vicious domesticated space dog that they can take pictures with. It'll be great.
  • Reminds me of the Kinison bit:

    "I'm like anyone else on this planet -- I'm very moved by world hunger. I see the same commercials, with those little kids, starving, and very depressed. I watch those kids and I go, 'Fuck, I know the FILM crew could give this kid a sandwich!' There's a director five feet away going, 'DON'T FEED HIM YET! GET THAT SANDWICH OUTTA HERE! IT DOESN'T WORK UNLESS HE LOOKS HUNGRY!!!' But I'm not trying to make fun of world hunger. Matter of fact, I think I have the answer. You want to stop world hunger? Stop sending these people food. Don't send these people another bite, folks. You want to send them something, you want to help? Send them U-Hauls. Send them U-Hauls, some luggage, send them a guy out there who says, 'Hey, we been driving out here every day with your food, for, like, the last thirty or forty years, and we were driving out here today across the desert, and it occurred to us that there wouldn't BE world hunger, if you people would LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW OUT HERE! YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND. KNOW WHAT IT'S GONNA BE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT'S GONNA BE SAND! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! GET YOUR STUFF, GET YOUR SHIT, WE'LL MAKE ONE TRIP, WE'LL TAKE YOU TO WHERE THE FOOD IS! WE HAVE DESERTS IN AMERICA -- WE JUST DON'T LIVE IN THEM, ASSHOLES!"
    --From an appearance on Rodney Dangerfield's "It's Not Easy Being Me," 1984.
  • People are worried about the warm water and steam that run into the oceans from factories (this is the clean stuff - just temperature changes). The temperature changes kill all sorts of fish within a huge range of the factories.

    Now, imagine a space station crashing through the atmosphere, heating up to insane temperatures, and falling into the middle of the ocean, where the water temperature stays mostly constant. If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...
  • But you can still register for the "Destination Mir" mailing list at the following website:

    What happens to the brave men and women competing to travel to Mir? Are they going to go down with it as part of the prize? [nbci.com]

  • Who says that it couldn't be auctioned off, anyway? Some VERY rich person could get it from Russia and pay to have it kept up...
  • Don't you think we could follow the event live and direct through the eyes of some earth observation satellites (could somebody name a few ?) ? Kewl huh ? ;)

    For once we could witness the amount of garbage we dare to throw into the ocean.

    --
  • Of course, by the time it drops through our atmosphere there won't be that much of it left to do much harm.

  • ... I've got a question. We've all heard the story that if a space vehicle doesn't enter the atmosphere at precisely the right angle, it'll bounce off like a stone skipping over water and fly off into the endless void of space. Why don't they do that with Mir (or any other spacecraft that have outlived their usefulness)? Seems a lot safer than trying to do a controlled crash.

    I'm sure there's a reason, just want to know what it is...

    Garg
  • What about it? In fact one could say what radiation?
    Am I missing somehting here?
    What hazardous material are we talking about?

    I'm not saing that we shouldn't think about the enviroment but blataint scare-mongering does more harm than good.

  • Since Mir is such a rare item, I'm wondering if they have a way of bringing it down safely. I.e., not destroying it on landing. Is it equipped with parachutes and rafts like our pods? Is would be a shame to make it into another titanic, unless of of course you trap Leonardo De Capprio (sp? ah who gives a..) in it. I would actually pay to watch it sink then. :-)

  • I know how we could keep it from burning up! Quick, someone call Michael Jackson and tell him to bring his facial cream (no disguisting pun intended). We lather up Mir in that before we send it towards Earth. That will protect it. Sure it may turn white, but that won't hurt it's career any. Hell look at MJ's career. Everyone loves him, cept for little boys but....

  • NOTW [newsoftheweird.com] summed it up...
    * As Russia's economy and drive toward democracy falter, consumption of vodka increases, but drinking habits long ago created a public health crisis for the country, according to a June Boston Globe story. Life expectancy is down to 59; average vodka consumption is three bottles a week; and two-thirds of all adult men are in fact drunk when they die.
  • Ill pay a million pesos to shoot down Mir with a high powered missle. It would be a lot cooler than just sinking the poor moldy basterd into the ocean.

    Anyway how much damage can something that big can do on impact?

  • Money (Score:1)

    by ALG ( 41966 )
    I wonder what's going to happen to the $40 million they raised if they're going just going to go ahead and dump the Mir anyways?

    ALG

  • Fungus (Score:1)

    by ALG ( 41966 )
    I wonder what's going to happen when they intorduce that nasty metal eating fungus into our environment?

    ALG
  • Can it really be that hard to target the biggest freakin object in our solar system??

    We can point the jets at the sun all we want, but there's still that whole gravity thing to contend with. It's how objects either stay in orbit or fall back to earth.

    It would take a lot more ooompf to get Mir to the sun than it would be to push it past critical orbit decay. Consider, getting to the sun would require competing not only with our gravity, but the moon's, venus' and likely Jupiter's. It's not just point it at the sun and let fly. Gravity has a nifty way of making satelites slingshot around larger bodies.

    So what would we need? A booster to get it out of Earth orbit with enough juice left over for something of that mass to navigate though the solar system without orbiting something else. Not trivial. And probably more that $40 million and much riskier than the current plan.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Chernobyl is russian for wormwood. I am fairly certain "mir" has no related mean.
  • ru551an-h4x0r login: 31337
    password: ******

    $ telnet maincomputer.mir.space.mil.ru 666
    SpaceBackOriffice password: ****

    motd: descent in progress. bye to all.

    # nohup /sbin/firethrusters --west 2m &
    # nohup /sbin/firethrusters --south 1m &
    # killall eggdrop
    logout
    --
  • whoops - typo ... sorry

    --
  • They won't fit: (think as metric vs. us/uk system and 220V vs 110V (actually mir uses 48V or something))

    --
  • What flight computers? That thing's been hanging in space since 1802 or so.
  • I hope by western you mean specifically a canadian reactor (nothing is better in that industry).
  • According to the BBC article [bbc.co.uk] on this subject, it's not just a case of dropping it into the ocean (They say the Indian Ocean, incidentally, not the Pacific):

    Mir's orbit, already decaying naturally because of atmospheric drag, will be reduced to 80 km (50 miles), causing the space station to enter the dense layers of the atmosphere where most of it will burn up. The remains of the station will then fall in a sparsely populated region of the Indian Ocean.

    "Everything will go according to the laws of physics: the station will burn and break apart," Blagov said, adding that the entire operation would take several days.

    Several days? Is this something that will be visible from the ground? That would look uber-cool.

  • Because you just handed a fat cheque to Mark Burnett (Producer of Survivor) to produce a show that involves MIR.

    "If a space station drops into the ocean when nobody's around, does it make a sound?"
  • .. I'd hate to think of the diastrous results that coud occur if Mir were allowed to fall onto the head of a small child in Colorado in an orange hooded coat. Next thing you know, the towm might come down with pink eye.

    -----
  • I don't buy it. By picking a site in the South Pacific, the Russians *know* that there will be *something* left of the Mir even after re-entry. I can't imagine that every part of the space station will get hot enough to disentegrate every single spore of the critters. All it takes is one ... and a whole new population would form.

    Ever read "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes? He writes about this gigantic hurricane (and smaller offspring) that wipes out most of the civilized world. The hurricane was caused by Algae blooms over the Atlantic that caused temperature inversions that had never been experienced before.

    There's just no way to tell what the impacts of introducing a new life form into an existing ecosystem will be. I say, strap a rocket on the b ack of the Mir and send it to play with Voyager.
  • They'll send the winner to the bottom of the Pacific instead? A month aboard Mir is a month aboard Mir, after all. Assuming it crashes where it's intended to, I mean Skylab [friends-partners.org] was supposed to come down in the ocean too. (But I think Skylab was completely uncontrollable at the time, unlike Mir.)
  • MirCorp has released a response to the, shall we say selective, reporting of Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov's statement here. [mirstation.com] Basically what the sensational headline "Mir To Crash Into Pacific" leaves out is "unless MirCorp can get more money." It is full of typical PR optimism, but it's obvious that Mir's fate is far from sealed, and with interest from Cameron/Tito/Burnett raising 60 million is hardly improbable.

  • Weren't you the kid who dropped the coke can on the sidewalk the other day and said "hey, don't worry, it's only a tiny bit of trash... [aracnet.com]" ?

    Nuclear test statistics (hey, what's a little bit of junk going to matter in the oceans.. [bellona.no] ?)

    UNITED STATES
    --Total number of tests: 1,054
    Pacific -- 106
    Nevada Test Site -- 928
    South Atlantic -- 3
    Other nuclear sites -- 17 FORMER SOVIET UNION --Total number of tests: 715 (969 devices)
    Semipalatinsk -- 456
    Novaya Zemlya -- 130
    Other nuclear sites -- 129

    UNITED KINGDOM
    --Total number of tests: 45
    Nevada Test Site -- 24
    Monte Bello Island -- 3
    Woomera -- 2
    Maralinga -- 7
    Christmas Island -- 9.

    CHINA
    --Total number of tests: 43

    FRANCE
    --Total number of tests: 210.
    --Tests were conducted at sites in Algeria, the Sahara Desert, North Africa, and in the South Pacific.

    INDIA
    --Total number of tests: 6

    ...and counting...

  • This stuff is up there being exposed to all kinds of gamma radiation from the sun (it's really tough sludge), so what happens if re-entry doesn't kill it? Are we really gonna bring this stuff back and drop it into the ocean? Is that really wise given the track record of introducing non-native species into habitats without predators? I mean the ocean has a lot of food for an enterprising bacteria, not to mention all the currents peices of Mir floating up on shore and bam we have a new colony of the stuff somewhere. Personally the idea of living in a world covered in a super slime doesn't appeal very much to me.
  • try "peace"
  • It hasn't been ruled out, but the price figure is now 2.5 times the previously "agreed" figure. This may be an atempt to get things closer to true costs or bribery. In the FSU you never know.
  • It'd cost much more to get MIR out of Earth orbit. Look at the cost of apollo relative to the size of Mir.

    If they boosted it to a higher orbit, they'd only be post-poning the inevitable.

    Dropping it in the ocean is much better than dropping it on NYC, Paris, Moscow Beijing, etc.
  • Easy - they're going to have to plan on training the contestants on deep-sea diving techniques rather than that whole cosmonaut program.

    --
  • I agree, that would be cool, but I think the reentry is violent enough and the space station is fragile enough that a) communications wouldn't work (isn't there a radio blackout during reentry?), b) the antenae will break very quickly, or c) both.

    But it would be cool.

    LL
  • Spend the money on making a large target, which we can put selected people on. When mir crashlands, it will take out those people.
  • Considering the number of Aircraft carriers, destroyers, merchant vessels, and the like we dumped in there during WWII, MIR is like a speck of cosmic dust in comparison.

    It's a nice thought, but the ocean is really FAR FAR too large a system to be affected by MIR's impact... if it were, consider what the Bikini Atoll atom bomb tests in the 50's would have done.

    Doug
  • If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of
    water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...

    Puleeze. Mir is a pretty big chunk of metal as metal chunks go, but it is insignificant when compared with the mass of the ocean. Try heating a spoon to red hot, and plunking it into a glass of water. Sure, the water around it sizzles for a second, then the spoon is cold, and so for the most part is the water in the glass. Do the math comparing their mass and the delta T. If you have some thermo classes, it's pretty evident that Mir won't do squat to raise the temperature of the earth's oceans.

  • It seems obvious to me: when the government does everything, there are a few things it does well. For solving social problems, the government is about the least effective institution possible. But, for scientific research and militarization, it's very effective.

    I really like how in this country we keep moving more and more socialist in regard to our social problems, but cut the military budget. Keep doing what doesn't work. :)

    On a side note, it's important to keep in mind that the USSR was pouring all its money into its military and space program. In its now democratic system, all the money goes toward corruption. :) That's terrific.

  • How does this affect Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor) and his plans for Destination Mir [nbci.com]?
  • What is truly sad is that the reactors at Chernobyl are still being used in the Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, they can't really afford to shut down the reactors that didn't go through the melt-down. I've seen documentaries of the place, and it is kinda spooky to see people taking trains to the reactor to work, and people deliberately trying to avoid the "hot spots" that are still there.

    I did hear some talk of international help to shut it down, and possibly build a more modern nuclear plant (western style) to replace it, but I havn't heard anything since then.

    What I'm trying to say is that your analogy is flawed, and yes, people are running the Chernobyl reactos for nostalgic reasons as well. Maybe we should talk about Three-mile Island... oh wait, that's still there as well. However, I don't think it is in current operation.
  • > for a piece of space history.....

    and for the METAL EATING FUNGUS FROM OUTER SPACE [slashdot.org] !

    --
  • Please mr. Russian president - dont't kill all the cute fish and the corals in the pacific ocean. We, the /.errs know a better place for you to drop the MIR:
    One Microsoft Way - Redmond VA.

    --
  • and then auction the old clunker off on ebay

    No, what I want is for Max Ary of The Kansas Cosmosphere [cosmo.org] to get it. He's grabbed more Soviet/Russian gear than anybody else in the free world. If the Russians crash Mir into the ocean, expect Max out there with a big catcher's mitt.
  • You'd have to put it in a special re-entry black box.... there are times during reentry when the charged ions block communication and the signal wouldn't get through...
  • Does anyone know the impact of bringing biological life back down to the planet that has existed in space for over 10 years? The /. article here [slashdot.org] talked about it -- but has it been studied?
  • That's assuming the heat of reentry kills it. If it doesn't, we'll be getting a great firsthand opportunity to study that fungus...
  • Hoooray! Now I can show my kids the fireworks show I've always promised them!

    Anybody know where it's gonna be?

    On another note: Goodbye Mir, it's been a good time.

    (Side note: I don't actually have kids... it's a joke, anyway.)
    -----
  • > Massive shortages of consumer goods, poverty,
    > crime, housing problems, political
    > corruption/oppression. Oh yeah but a they had
    >a good space station.

    Which goes to show something else entirely.

    The political/economic system doesn't matter much. If you give smart people lots of resources, they can build some really cool things.

    It also goes to show the major failing of ALL political systems - resources will get allocated according to political process rather than according to logic and common sense.

    If russia was truely communistic, and truely believed in "the people" (afterall, isn't the basic tennant of socialism that the welfare of the people is paramount?) then maybe they would have allocated resources to raising the standard of living and producing enough food and goods for their entire populace - rather than trying to shoot cool toys into space and engaging in an insane arms race?

    Of course the same could be said of the US. Armed forces Generals have been saying for years "We have enough nukes, we can stop making them" yet every year congress allocated more money to making new nukes.

    Politics in action!

    -Steve

  • Apart from the disruption caused by a large weight dropping into water

    My guess is that it will be a bunch relatively small "weights" dropping into the water

    the fact that inevitably, the structure of Mir will begin to decay, especially at the pressures encountered at the bottom of the ocean.

    I bet their won't be any part of Mir intact enough for pressure to be an issue

    The end result - radioactive contamination will poison the ocean.

    Any potential radioactive contamination will be far less then the contamination from all the nuclear tests that were conducted in the Pacific.

    If they have to get rid of Mir by dropping it into the ocean, then they should damn well get rid of the hazardous material it contains first.

    Anybody have any idea of how much "hazardous material" is on Mir? I would guess it is pretty small compred to other sources of pollution.

  • ...no, not MIR. The weirdo fungus it's infested with will die on reentry! Hey, it's AFAIK the only space-borne fungus we have, and we're heartlessly going to kill it?

    Join the SPWSF now! The Society for the Protection of Weird Space Fungi needs your help!

    Klaus
    ---
    "What, I need a *reason* for everything?" -- Calvin
  • supposed to land in South Park, CO, and kill Kenny? Then they all come back as flesh eating zombies?

    Or was that an acid flashback again :-(

  • ...Crashing things in oceans...
  • Despite all its shortcomings, Mir is a remarkable piece of engineering to be able to last this long, and is also proof that alternative systems to capitalism can really produce high quality technology. It's far more impressive than Skylab ever was, and it's been home to the longest human space missions in history. To just let it crash into the ocean is a tragedy--you'd think enough people would be able to spare the money to save it. Incidentally, I wonder if it would have had a far better fate under the communist government.
  • and i wanted to win the Destination Mir show, go up there and lick the psycadelic fungus!

    my dreams are squashed because of money *boohoo*

    anywhoo...if it goes into the pacific, that's international waters right? and if i recall, if something in/on the water has nothing living on it then its free game? Can you imagine the amount of precious metal on that thing? nor to mention the nifty gadgets?!

    where's coustou's number at?

    NO SPORK
  • Maybe when they send up the Progress ship with the fuel and so on, they can take samples of the fungus. It certainly would be interesting to study in the lab at home!
  • Hmm... how much longer can we go on dumping our junk in the oceans without seriously screwing up our ecosystems... Wouldn't some of the $40million be better spent attaching powerful boosters to the station and firing it off into space, or boosting into a geosynch. orbit and keeping it there... I know it would be a hazard to other misions if it's in a geosync orbit but atleast its position would be know and so avoidance could be taken.
  • Well, it's not as if the Soviet Union had just one company the government would use. Various powerplants manufacturers, electronics firms, design bureaus and so on would compete with each other for funding and, very importantly, prestige. The latter especially would help them attract the best graduates from good engineering schools and have the political clout to secure even more contracts. I'm honestly too lazy to look up the names of particular bureaus in the current space program, but the competition between the Chelomei and Yangel bureaus in the 1960s springs to mind.
    --
    Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
    H. Rap Brown
  • I'm curious if all the space fungus will adapt to the ocean life and start propogating and thriving, before they are able to clean up the mess, or if they reentry will sizzle the little rascals before hitting the ocean. Also, for as long as its been in space, it has to have soaked up a large amount of radiation. Any hints as to what the outcome of all this will be?
  • Geraldo will host a live 3 hour TV show, to see what mysteries are locked away in the Mir spacestation. He'll drone on about aliens that visited Mir, and secretly helped with some of the missions. They'll be talk about Einstein-Rosen brige experiments. Speculations will be made about Zero-G sexual activities. They have plans to plant a small little boy named Kenny donning an orange jump suit about Mir, just before reentry. If there's a lull in the show, they have backup plans to talk about Jimmy Hoffa and Timothy Lear.

    It will make broadcasing history.
  • I hate to say this, but couldn't MirCorp just launch another "space station" for the sole purpose of housing people? $40 million obviously wouldn't be enough, but it seems they don't have much trouble raising money to fund a battered and unreliable Mir, so why not raise enough to blast another habital environment into space?

    If their purpose is to get civilians into space, I'm sure they'd have a more warm reception if it were on a platform that wasn't prone to random catastrophic failure (and if the tickets were less expensive, thank you).

    -C
    --
  • How does this affect Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor) and his plans for Destination Mir?

    I know that if I won a chance to go on Mir, and Mir was being decomissioned, I would have no problems taking the ISS as a substitute prize.

    On the other hand, Destination Mir probably wouldn't be quite as interesting an idea if it weren't for Mir being so rickety. Where's the fun in competing to get on a brand new, safe space station?

  • The solution is obvious. Call in Sally Struthers [slashdot.org] on this. This poor, fuel-starved space station needs YOUR help. Won't you please give? Only another 40 million dollars, and we can save Mir for all of humanity. And if you won't give for Mir, then please give to save the innocent fungus [slashdot.org] barely clinging to life on it, in a hostile, airless environment.

    Or at least save Mir so we can have more "reality programming [slashdot.org]".

  • Is this a troll? Where do you think spent boosters from the ESA or NASA are dumped? In addition, when the Russians say they are going to dump the Mir in the Pacific they don't mean it is going to survive re-entry structurally intact; they just want to avoid an incident like the time a chunk of Skylab fell to ground on Australia when Skylab was being, er, retired.

    And no, residual radiation from the Mir (if there is any; it was primarily solar powered) will not be significant.

  • Hmm... how much longer can we go on dumping our junk in the oceans without seriously screwing up our ecosystems...

    With junk like this, indefinitely. Think about the volume of the ocean. Then think about the size of this space station. Then think about what the space station will go through on re-entry. Then tell me there will be measurable harm to the ecosystem.

  • there was some way to control the crash of Mir and then auction the old clunker off on ebay. Im sure some rich person wouldnt mind shelling out big bucks for a piece of space history.....

    "sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
  • It's US's NASA which has always been good at crashing things into oceans -- the US is surrounded by two, so they make convenient landing targets.

    Russia/USSR never had much in the way of navagable ocean -- Vladivostok is frozen for half the year, and that's as far south as they can get on the Pacific, while Europe blocks most of the Atlantic (and the Black Sea is too shallow). So whereas the US could just aim for an ocean, Russia had to land on terra firma, a much greater challenge.

    (As for your quip that they're good at *crashing*, per se, that's simply not true. Most of their failures either blew up on the ground or blew up in mid air. Very few were successful up-until attempted landings.)
  • They'll just adapt to their new environment and find new employment singing [geocities.com] in Disney adaptations of Hans Christien Andersson stories. There's precedent, you know.
  • It'd be nice to keep it up there for nostalgic reasons, but that's like saying we should keep the Chernobyl reactors running for nostalgic reasons. It vastly exceeded its projected lifespan and it's coming apart at the seams. Far better is it to bring it down in the ocean than on some populated location (no matter what the MS/Redmond snickers say to the contrary).

    Might it have kept running longer under a communist regime? Perhaps, in that reality is a little slower to seep in when making decisions that have a large political component. But at the same time, under a communist regime, there'd probably be a whole new space station up there replacing MIR by now. So either way, it's a moot point.

  • At least they're being responsible. (Score:3)

    by Sangui5 ( 12317 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @07:11AM (#683305)
    A lot of space junk has just been left up there, creating a navigation nightmare, and a hazard for the ISS.

    At least the Russians are resposible enought to spend the money to down Mir properly. They are really squeezed, and it says something that they are going to blow a bunch of cash when they don't really _have_ to clean up.

    Also, this is one less chance for the producers of those awful voyeristic TV shows. I know a lot of people may have liked Survivor, but I'd rather watch something else, thank you...
  • Sad that Mircorp coudn't make this happen. The premise of being the first commercial space hotel could have been very good for Russia. Thier economy could use the boost and so could the Russion people. They really need something to foster a sense of nationalism as it appears thier esteem is at an all time low and we have not heard any good news out of there in a long time. It looks like the Russians figured out what the US hasn't been able to: throwing lots of money at problems doesn't make them go away. Maybe now with their focus back on ISS we will enjoy the benefit of their extensive knowledge in extented duration spaceflight. I feel for them. The road to capitalism is a long and hard one from a communist state. It will take many lessons like this before they really get back on thier feet. I just wish that they wouldn't deorbit Mir. As expensive as it is to get things into orbit we should find some solution where we can recycle the massive amount of materials instead of dropping them back down to us. I'd rather entertain the idea of pushing Mir into a higher orbit until we can get a program going to take advantage of the raw materials that could be salvaged. NASA had an article not to long ago where they were discussing the idea of assembling satelites in space to save on the weight that over construction for launch adds to them. Combine that idea with some sort of recycler project and there wouldn't be any more deorbits required.

  • If this thing stays up much longer... (Score:3)

    by small_dick ( 127697 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @07:01AM (#683307)
    ...I'll start suspecting an Amiga involvement.

  • Now, imagine a space station crashing through the atmosphere, heating up to insane temperatures, and falling into the middle of the ocean, where the water temperature stays mostly constant. If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...

    Oh, please! Let's imagine that when Mir hits, it is at the same temperature as the surface of the sun (5700 K), while the ocean where it lands has a temperature of 280K. Let's say that Mir is made of steel with a total mass of 100,000 kg.

    Heat capacity of steel = 447 J/(kg*K) , heat capacity of water = 4169 J/(kg*K).

    So the heat energy supplied by the station is (447)*(100000)*(5700 - 280) = 2.42*10^11 J. Dividing by the heat capacity of water, we get a result of 5.8*10^7 kg*K.

    In order to calculate a temperature rise, we need to decide how much of the ocean's volume to consider. For the first calculation, consider a cube of water 100m on each side. I hope you will all agree that this is an absolutely tiny fraction of the entire Pacific ocean.

    The volume of water in this 100m cube is (100^3) =10^6 m^3, and the density of water is 1000 kg/m^3. Therefore, the mass of water in this cube is 10^9 kg.

    So, (deltaT)*(10^9 kg) = 5.8*10^7 kg*K

    deltaT = 0.058 K (or 0.10 degF for Americans).

    Now take a look at http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/geos/1112.html [ucsb.edu] , a page studying the El Nino phenomenon. Look at the satellite photos on that page, and figure out for yourself how much impact a 0.058 degree temperature rise in a 100m section of the Pacific ocean is going to have. Also note the section in the text which says "On warm sunny days, the surface waters can heat up by as much as 1-2 degrees C during the daytime hours".

    Granted, any fish which happens to be at "ground zero" is going to get cooked, but the ecosystem is going to be completely indifferent to the event (at least from a thermodynamic perspective).

    p.s. The environmental damage caused by industrial cooling-water is real. However, there you have a continuous source of heat energy rather than a one-time addition of a heated space station.

  • Re:Plea... (Score:4)

    by wesmills ( 18791 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @07:05AM (#683309) Homepage
    One Microsoft Way - Redmond VA

    I pity whoever in Virginia has this address ... Washington might be a better state to ditch it in, anyway. :)

    ---

  • Re:What about the radiation? (Score:5)

    by dnnrly ( 120163 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @07:26AM (#683310)
    Um? Where did you get the idea that Mir was radioactive? To start with, there is no nuclear pile aboard. a) it's too heavy and inconvenient to put up their (not only the pile but all that shielding as well) and b) it wasn't strictly necessary since it's easier to work things so that they draw less power and stick a couple of photoelectric cells (albeit big ones) to side of the station!

    Before you go on about it being irradiated in outer space, I'd just like to point out that cosmic radiation just isn't strong enough there and any solar winds are mostly deflected by the earths magnetosphere. Anyway, even if Mir gets a good dose of beta radiation (free electrons for the uninitiated), any charge that builds up will just be 'absorbed' by the atmosphere. You probably get more extra electrons form solar wind in a second than you would form Mir no matter how long it had stayed up! As for alpha particles I think their only dangerous if their fast moving.

    Not as if any less radiation is put into the sea by you average Nuclear power station or sunken nuclear submarine in the baltic sea.

    dnnrly

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