It's been a frantic few days aboard the world's only functional space station, as three men prepared to abandon their orbital home Friday evening and leave humanity without a presence in space for the first time in more than a decade.
"They are picking up and prepared for the descent," said Sergei Pouzanov from the Russian mission control station in Korolev, outside of Moscow.
Commander Viktor Afansyev, flight engineer Sergei Avdeyev and French researcher Jean-Pierre Haignere are scheduled to seal themselves inside their cramped Soyuz TM spaceship shortly after 2 p.m. ET and pull away from Mir about three hours later.
They are leaving now because the six-month orbital lifetime of the crew's return vehicle - the Soyuz TM spaceship -- has come to an end, and -- for the first time since 1989 -- there will not immediately be another one to take its place.
"Usually the lifetime of (the Soyuz) determines the duration of the mission," said Pouzanov. That is the situation here, he added.
During a press conference earlier this week, Afanasyev, who is under a great deal of pressure to prepare Mir to be left untended, said he doesn't like that the station will be unmanned for so long. No decision has been made about whether to send another crew to the station early next year, although two cosmonauts are in training for such a flight.
If they are dispatched to Mir, their mission will likely be to perform a Dr. Kevorkian-style assisted-suicide : The Russian Space Agency is out of government funds to operate Mir and if no private financing is found, the station is to be driven out of orbit so it can re-enter Earth's atmosphere and be destroyed.
Fuel will need to be delivered to Mir to time its descent so that any pieces that survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere will splash down into the ocean. The Russians have not yet explained exactly how or when Mir will die. The only policy top Russian space officials have clearly and repeatedly stated is that the government's commitments to the International Space Station will come first.
"I feel ambivalence," said former astronaut Norm Thagard, the first American to live on Mir. "On one hand, I'm glad that the Russians will now devote their full attention to their role in the International Space Station, but on the other hand, a bit of nostalgia because it has been quite a thing to have up there since 1986."
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