Slashdot Mirror
Mir Deathwatch
Well, everybody and his brother wants to let us know that Mir is coming down, really, they mean it this time. Pick your favorite site to track its descent: Yahoo | NY Times | United States Space Command | Heavens Above | BBC. But Frederic Freidel provides an oddly personal note: what goes up must come down.
Jacek Fedorynski took a look at Guess When Mir Will Splash and drew up this nice histogram of the guesses. He also notes that the median guess for Mir's return to Mother Earth was 2001-03-19 10:11:01, so the collective wisdom of slashdot was off by a few days.
Nowhere in this slashdot story do we mention either the stupid Taco Hell advertising campaign or the space fungus or the Crashing Mir Space Station Detecto-Hat.
Letting MIR crash into the Pacific isn't just irresponsible; it's unpatriotic. MIR was a monument to the great Socialist state. It was the last major project the Russian space agency participated in with any great fanfare or success.
And now we just want to deorbit it? To erase it from our memories? If we do not learn from history, then we will be doomed to repeat it. Our children will live in a world without a Russian space station orbiting above their heads. When they look out into the night sky, they won't see the work of MAN shining back at them. They'll only see the light from stars exploded billions of years ago, awash in the effusing glow of decaying atomic matter.
How much better it would've been for them to see the great Soviet empire whizzing overhead! Men died to build that great colossus. Countless dogs perished in orbit in order to test the effects of zero-g environments. Hundreds of manhours were spent in that endeavor, and we'll take it all down for what? So that we can free up a little bit more extraterrestrial realestate for a shiny new commercial satellite?
It reinforces the idea that space is to be a commercial enterprise and no longer one engaged in the pursuit of the common weal. What would Captain Kirk say about our worship of the dollar? What would he say about how we refuse to let this waystation remain on the outskirts of our fair planet just waiting for a new spirit or being to arrive and peer gently and softly at our pulsating ecosystems? The one thing the Soviets had right was their decrying of capitalism and the dammages it's wreaked on our terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. Now, MIR will be gone, and nothing will remain in its stay.
This is a sad day.
I recognize that many Australians are concerned about where Mi is going to land. I've looked into the matter. Despite losing to CBS in the most recent Nielsen ratings, ABC does not intend to crash Mir into Australia to wipe out the cast of Survivor II. Any suggestions to the contrary are completely and utterly false.
Actually, CNN is doing it to boost it's own ratings.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Don't forget to visit http://mirpool.com to put your vote on which latitude and longitude Mir will land.
Watch out kenny! :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
When Skylab went down in Australia, some of its larger bits emitted several sonic booms as they decelerated to subsonic speeds.
This is now past tense, since Mir is apparently warming the minnows at this point, but could these sonic booms have been heard in the any of the nearby Pacific Islands? Easter Island, Hawaii, etc?
Of course, I'm not really expecting something on a Krakatoa scale, and I doubt the sound wave would still be audible by the time it reaches me several hours late
This article in Yahoo on the Countdown slates re-entry between 1:20 AM and 1:30 AM EST, Friday, March 23.
A site with a real future, www.mirrentry.com
Heavens Above, which has charted the orbital decay.
On the Marx-Spinning-In-His-Grave front:
Leading up to the event have been word of passengers paying $5,000-10,000 a seat to fly around the area in hopes of catching a glimpse (of course, they'll have to be on the correct side of the plane.)
Should the core of Mir hit a 40' square target, Taco Bell will give everyone in the USA a free Taco
An alert eBayer, always right on the cutting edge of capitalism has offered up the Crashing MIR Space Station Detecto-Hat Made of the best stainless steel double-handled colander five dollars could buy... (No word yet from Rambus on patent infringement.)
Lastly I hope that the mutant space fungus will be burned up on re-entry. I don't want to wake up drooling beside a pod.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar