Word: mir
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...tense days last week, the prestige of the Russian space program -- and the well-being of three cosmonauts -- was in jeopardy as a planned rendezvous in orbit went suddenly awry. A Progress rocket laden with food and other vital supplies glided up to -- and right past -- the Mir space station. Ground controllers then made a second effort to dock the two craft, but failed. By late Friday afternoon, the Progress could make only one last pass; this time cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko would try to maneuver Mir into a favorable position. Finally, with no more room for error, Malenchenko...
That made the situation aboard Mir unsettling, to say the least. Cosmonauts Malenchenko, Valeri Poliakov and Talgat Musabayev have been subsisting on supplies left over from earlier missions, including food two years past its expiration date. They've had to drink water recycled from their breath and sweat...
...last week's docking had failed, the cosmonauts would have had to cut , short their stay, returning to earth in an emergency re-entry vehicle stored on the Mir. That would have meant leaving the station unmanned for the first time in five years and abandoning a planned record-setting 427-day tour in space by Poliakov...
Though the mission was saved, Mir's brush with disaster fanned doubts about the fitness of Russia's space program. That is of no small concern to the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan, which have formed a partnership with Russia to build a new space station. In the first phase of the venture, the Europeans are scheduled to put an astronaut on Mir in October, and an American is supposed to go aboard next year...
After two failed tries this week and with just one more chance left, a Russian cosmonaut successfully docked a food-laden Progress M-24 rocket with the orbital space station Mir. The risky move may have saved Russia's manned space program from extinction. If the manual attempt had failed, the three cosmonauts on board Mir would have had to abandon the craft and board an emergency re-entry vehicle. High jinks on the ground made their predicament far worse: underpaid ground-support technicians stole many of their edibles before takeoff, and the cosmonauts were subsisting on recycled wastewater...