Our expedition to watch the plummet of Space Station Mir, the largest man-made object ever to reenter Earth's atmosphere, is about to take off.

Our party, organized by Mirreentry.com, Inc., will depart Nadi, Fiji by bus on March 23 at 7:00 a.m. local time, right after breakfast. We will travel three hours and 15 minutes to Suva, the capital of Fiji. We must be there at 11:45 a.m. where our party will be split to board two aircraft -- a Brasilia and a Bandiarante, which together can hold a total of about 35 people. There will be 23 on one aircraft and 12 on the other.

We cant fly directly from Nadi, the area where we're staying, for two reasons. First, the aircraft's range is limited. It is not sufficient to take us far enough if we take off from Nadi. Suva is closer to the observation point. Second, its a matter of economics -- flying the aircraft to Nadi, refueling them and flying directly to the stations observation area would cost extra $3,000 or $4,000 dollars.

There is an additional reason too. According to official regulations, pilots can work only 12 hours a day. If they fly to Nadi and back, they will run over their 12-hour time limitation.

We will fly both aircraft to Tonga, which is about 400 miles (645 kilometers) southeast of Suva. At that point we will refuel the planes, which will take about half an hour. While we wait for takeoff, we will be refresh ourselves in the VIP lounge.

The small plane will leave ahead of the big one because it is a slower craft. Our plane will travel approximately 650 additional miles (965 kilometers) beyond Tonga. The other will position itself about 500 miles (805 kilometers) southeast of Tonga.

We will fly in a holding pattern in the area for 10 or 15 minutes before the Mir space station comes over.

We plan to get to the site approximately 20 minutes before the predicted time of the station's fall. And then we will have to orient our aircraft so we can see the Mir come over the horizon. It might be quite spectacular even before it starts burning because we will be in twilight, if not complete darkness.

Mirs elevation will be 57 miles (92 kilometers) or so from where we are looking. We should be able to see it even before it starts burning. At our location it will be at an altitude of 55 miles (88 kilometers) when it comes by. The whole pass is going take 200 seconds, from horizon to horizon, or more than 3 degrees per second. No one knows where it is going to break up, and we believe we will at least see it streak by so that we can say goodbye to Mir.

We will be about 125 to 155 miles (200 or 250 kilometers) away from the satellite's track in order to get the elevation down to an angle where we can just look out of the window and see it.

Rafail Murtazin, RSC Energia deputy chief ballistics specialist believes that the best way to observe the stations reentry would be to cross its final path when the outpost is still at an altitude of 50 miles (80 kilometers). This way passengers on each side of the aircraft would be able to observe the event for about three minutes.

There is a concern, however, that the pilots wont go that far into a restricted zone.

To see Mir "set" over the southeastern horizon, we'll have to turn the plane again to watch it. Once it has disappeared, we will have to head back to Tonga to refuel. Then from Tonga we will fly back to Nadi, arriving about 2 a.m. local time. All told, the whole Mirreentry mission will take about 24 hours.

"I am not concerned about other mass media possibly coming to the deorbit area," Bob Citron told SPACE.com. "My joy is having my Russian guests here -- the cosmonauts, the designer and the chief organizer of the whole Russian team -- and seeing the event."

According to Citron, these dozen or so people came to Fiji to have an adventure, and to try to profit from this experience. "But because this expedition is so expensive, I would like to recover [the] losses by being able to market some of the material that we get. But if we dont do that, I am still happy," said Citron.