RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 5, No. 42, Part I, 1 March 2001
CONFLICT OVER 'MIR' CONTINUES. Rosaviakosmos head Yurii Koptev said on 28 February that Russia has taken all necessary procedures for decommissioning and deorbiting the "Mir" spacecraft, Interfax reported. He said Russia, which now spends only 50 percent as much on space exploration as does India, had no choice but to bring the station down. Energiya General Director Yuri Semenov agreed that the station should come down but that it might not have been necessary to do it so quickly, ITAR-TASS reported. But many politicians and journalists continued to suggest that the deorbiting of the "Mir" is an act of betrayal. An example of this position was contained in "Zhizn (Moskovskie vedomosti)," no. 7, which suggested that Moscow had agreed to bring the station down in a part of the Pacific Ocean where American naval divers can retrieve it "to create efficient space-based armed forces and an anti-missile system." PG
Copyright (c) 2001. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. http://www.rferl.org
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
