The head of the scientific and technical councils of Roscosmos and Rostec, the ex-head of the Russian Space Agency (1992-1999) and the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (1999-2004), Yuri Koptev, in an interview with RIA Novosti, spoke about the reasons for the flooding station “Mir”.
According to him, the technical condition in which the Mir orbital complex was located did not allow its further exploitation. So, equipment at the station regularly failed, and this threatened the safety of the crew.
“The decisions were made on the basis that very significant failures began to appear at the station, we lost communication, control of the station, there was a fire. We had a number of failures of fundamental systems, which we could not fill, “- quotes the words of NSN Koptev.
February 20 marks 35 years since the beginning of the deployment in orbit of the world’s first orbital complex “Mir”, which received 104 cosmonauts from 12 countries.
The complex existed in orbit for 4594 days and during this time it has flown more than 3.6 billion km, which is more than from Earth to Uranus. On March 23, 2001, the station was deorbited and sunk in the Pacific Ocean.
Earlier on February 20, the Russian cosmonaut, hero of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation Sergei Krikalev told how he received news in space about the collapse of the USSR. Pilot-cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev went to the Mir station in the USSR, and returned to Russia in March 1992.