Russia feared Mir was lost in space

Space chief Koptev said crew was preparing to head for Mir

MOSCOW, Russia -- A senior Russian official has said engineers feared they might never regain control of the Mir space station after they lost communication for 24 hours.

Yuri Koptev, head of the space and aviation agency, said that once the 130-tonne unmanned station suddenly stopped beaming data to ground control, his main concern was to make sure the craft was still in one piece.

Ground controllers lost contact with Earth's biggest man-made satellite on Monday before re-establishing communication on Tuesday. The incident sparked fears it might fall on populated areas.

"We were very worried that we might have lost the complex altogether," he said on Wednesday.

"But our colleagues from the space monitoring centre ... confirmed that it was following its usual orbit and was still complete and not an array of scattered bits."

Officials have said that in the absence of any information from space they ruled nothing out, even that the 14-year-old station had been destroyed by space debris.

Engineers eventually established that the black-out was due to a mysterious discharge of all of its batteries.

Koptev said that as Mir's transmitters remained dead he informed Russian President Vladimir Putin and the government of the situation and ordered a special crew to prepare for an emergency flight to the silent craft.

Two cosmonauts were told to prepare themselves for a possible docking with the ungovernable, spinning station and use their capsule's engines to prevent Mir coming crashing down to earth.

Koptev said that even if their mission had failed and the station kept spinning down in an uncontrolled way it would not have hit land immediately.

The crisis ended as unexpectedly as it began when computer screens at the ground control near Moscow began lighting up with bits of data from Mir on Tuesday afternoon.

Koptev said the station had resumed sending signals when the communication session with the ground control overlapped with the time its solar panels faced the Sun and could feed energy directly to transmitters.

Koptev said Mir was now accumulating energy and would be dumped in the Pacific in late February, as planned.

A cargo craft with an extra supply of fuel to guide Mir to earth is due to go up before that date. If it fails to dock, the emergency crew will still have to blast off and conduct the operation manually, he said.

The loss of communication was the latest mishap for the nearly 15-year-old space station. Observers have been worried about the Mir's safety for a long time.

However, after a fire and near-disastrous collision with an unmanned cargo ship in 1997 followed by a series of computer glitches, the Mir had been running relatively smoothly.

There have been careful preparations for its descent after a Soviet satellite crashed into northern Canada in 1978, causing the Soviet leadership major embarrassment. Nobody was hurt but radioactive fragments were scattered over the wilderness.

The unoccupied U.S. Skylab space station fell to Earth in 1979 when its orbit deteriorated faster than anticipated, scattering debris over western Australia. Again no-one was hurt.

And in 1991, fragments of the Soviet Salyut-7 space station, the Mir's predecessor, fell on Argentina's Andes Mountains near the Chilean border, inflicting no damage or injuries but generating fears worldwide.

Reuters contributed to this report.

'Controlled' Mir re-entry promised
Russia restores contact with Mir
Pacific ditching for Mir in February
Russia plans to dump Mir space station
Future of Mir in doubt after cosmonauts return home

Russian Government
Russian Space Agency
Mir Space Station Observing
Mir's Faculty Online
Mir's location (NASA)

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