Lost in Space The Fall of Nasa and the Dream of a New Space Age

Chapter 1 The Price of "Peace" Our twin-prop Brasilia leapt off the runway like a startled bird, the turbocharged engines groaning as they struggled to pull the plane upward through the steamy funk that passes for air in the late-summer tropics. We had only a few seconds to watch the Fijian capital city of Suva-a hodgepodge of tin-roofed jungle, architectural brutalism-melt from view like a hazy ghost town. Then the world outside went white, and we became part of the clouds. In the low-pressure turbulence the Brasilia popped and bobbed like a bathtub toy, but we sat in contented silence, happy to be airborne. It had been raining all day, sometimes in scattered wisps of mist, more often in pounding sheets of practically solid liquid. Our group, about thirty in all, had traveled for nearly three hours by bus from our base outside of the town of Nadi, a creaky tourist trap on the rounded curve of Fiji's southwest side. The rain had made for slow, treacherous driving on the island's snaking roads, which seemed to be losing the battle against the jungle's tireless campaign to reclaim them. In the end, the roads and the jungle had cost us time, a commodity we had only in the sparest quantity. Nevertheless, here we were. We had traveled from all over the world and spent an anxious week in Fiji for a chance at witnessing two hundred seconds of history. As our plane roared through the late afternoon sky, none of us were thinking about the hoops we'd jumped through to shoehorn ourselves into a small plane buzzing southeast toward what one member of our group had dubbed the loneliest place on the planet. Instead, we were thinking about Mir. The Brasilia was on course to a position where we could observe the aging Russian space station as it plummeted from the sky. For more than two years, space engineers around the world had done computer modeling and other scientific soothsaying to anticipate what Mir would do when it plowed into the upper atmosphere at seven times the speed of sound. As we took off from Suva that afternoon, there was general agreement that the models and predictions amounted to a collective shrug: Mir was a 140-ton Tinkertoy the size of a jumbo jet, massive and unpredictable. It was more than twice as large as the second-largest man-made object ever to return to Earth, the American Skylab space station, which in 1979 had skipped down from orbit slightly askew and accidentally rained debris across the Australian outback, mercifully scarring nothing but the landscape. Still, even Skylab offered only a limited precedent to Mir's reentry. The only certainty was that once Mir reached an altitude of about 130 miles above the Earth there would be no turning back. Mir would come home. We were to fly parallel to a rectangular swath of ocean that stretched southeast from Fiji roughly toward Argentina. This was to be Mir's "debris footprint," a mostly empty patch of water with no populated landmasses, no shipping lanes and only a smattering of fishing boats whose captains had been duly warned of Mir's pending return. It was here that the Russians would try to dump what was left of Mir after it burned its way through the Earth's heavy blanket of air, which captures an astonishing one hundred tons or so of space junk each year and incinerates it before a trace can touch terra firma. Again, Mir was a different story. Because of its size, what was left of the station after reentry could be considerable; up to forty tons of metal that would be traveling faster than a rifle bullet, even after being slowed by the atmosphere. This is exactly what we hoped to see. Our flight plan had been recalculated dozens of times, and the very date of Mir's demise-March 23, 2001-was finalized only two days before we took off from Suva. With real-time updates from both NASA and Russian space centers, we would be able to position our planes (a smaller Bandeirante would trKlerkx, Greg is the author of 'Lost in Space The Fall of Nasa and the Dream of a New Space Age', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375421501 and ISBN 0375421505.