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With Heavy Hearts, Mir Crew Says Good-bye
By Irene Brown
Cape Canveral Bureau Chief
posted: 03:24 pm ET
27 August 1999
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mir_heartsThe Mir crew gathered in the stations core module on Friday, huddled underneath a 13-year-old picture of Soviet space pioneer Yuri Gagarin, and faced the television cameras for one last time. Even in the last minutes of the station's occupation, the crew was unwilling to accept that it would likely be the last. "We undertake this with a heavy heart and anticipate the future arrival of other crews to renew the work that weve been doing here," said commander Viktor Afansyev. His Russian words were interpreted by a translator and broadcast on NASA Television. "The station will be left in excellent condition," added flight engineer Sergei Avdeyev, "and will be available to all who wish to work here in the future." Afansyev, flight engineer Sergei Avdeyev and French researcher Jean-Pierre Haignere are scheduled to climb into their Soyuz TM spacecraft and pull away from the station at 5:14 p.m. ET. Once they leave, Mir will be left without cosmonauts for the first time in more than a decade. A crew is in training to return to the station, but financing for such a mission is uncertain. Plans are being developed to fly the station out of orbit and plunge it into the atmosphere to be destroyed early next year.
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