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Mir To Crash Into Pacific
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.
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.
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
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
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
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
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
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.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
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.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
How does this affect Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor) and his plans for Destination Mir?
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 !
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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.
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No, what I want is for Max Ary of The Kansas Cosmosphere 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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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...
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
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 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...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.)
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> 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
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
Yet Another Web Site
...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
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Or was that an acid flashback again :-(
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
...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
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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.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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
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All opinions presented here aren't mine.
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?
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Or at least save Mir so we can have more "reality programming".
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
And no, residual radiation from the Mir (if there is any; it was primarily solar powered) will not be significant.
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..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
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.)
-- Anne Marie
They'll just adapt to their new environment and find new employment singing in Disney adaptations of Hans Christien Andersson stories. There's precedent, you know.
-- Anne Marie
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.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
...I'll start suspecting an Amiga involvement.
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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