MIR wasn鈥檛 Jean-Pierre Haigner茅鈥檚 favourite place. Asked what the ageing Soviet space station he was staying on smelled and sounded like, the French astronaut said: 鈥淢ir to me sometimes smells like burnt coffee. The background noise is similar to the engine room of a boat or a noisy aeroplane. The numerous fans aboard the station are the primary source of this nuisance, which averages 67 decibels. I have completely forgotten what silence is like.鈥� On whether he had any privacy, his answer was even more definitive: 鈥淣o!鈥�
The interview, published in 麻豆传媒鈥榮 4 September 1999 issue, marked the culmination of Haigner茅鈥檚 second stint orbiting Earth, as well as the impending end of Mir鈥檚 long-term crewed operations.
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Mir, whose name means 鈥減eace鈥� or 鈥渨orld鈥� in Russian, was launched in 1986. It developed out of the Salyut programme, which had launched a series of smaller space stations starting in 1971. That had made the Soviet Union the undisputed leader in the field: the US had only ever had one space station in orbit, the short-lived Skylab.
Once in orbit, Mir lived up to its name, with an increasingly international crew showing a new spirit of cooperation in space. They devoted themselves to experiments in human biology, physics, astronomy and meteorology, all while orbiting Earth 15.7 times a day at about 27,700 kilometres per hour.
Mir developed a reputation for its astonishing ability to survive disaster after disaster, including computer failures, oxygen leaks, on-board fires and, of course, the 1991 collapse of the state that had launched it. For all his reservations, Haigner茅 was proud of Mir鈥檚 achievements, especially in its straitened final post-Soviet years. 鈥淎t the moment, procedures are not applied strictly enough. But that is natural given the reduction of resources. In our Western system, everything would have come to a halt a long time ago,鈥� he said.
Despite efforts by a privately funded company to reactivate and repair Mir, it deorbited on 23 March 2001, breaking up on re-entry over the Pacific Ocean. Yet its spirit lives on. Russian ideas for a successor were combined with US Reagan-era plans to give humanity a new home in space from 2000 onwards: the International Space Station.
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