Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer

Time:

4:00 pm.

I guess the slow weekend might be allowing me too much time to obsess about this. I got to talking to some of the Russian spacecraft about my old friend Mir, and decided to go looking for what I could find about him on this internet thing.

Well, I found a lot. This is probably the most poignant. I also spent a lot of time reading this.

I keep trying to compose a really good explanation of what Mir meant to me. I've used up a lot of my bulk storage trying today, and I keep erasing it because it looks like some maudlin navel gazing crap. (Not that I have a navel, but I can read, and I understand the metaphor.)

So, let me just lay it out for you. All of us who are low Earth orbiters have to deal with the fact that someday we're going to burn. Reentry is our unavoidable fate. This isn't something we talk about much with the geostationary sats, because they have their own problems with contemplating the slow loss of their sensors and memories as they orbit forever. We do get to go out fast and clean in a blaze across the sky, and I guess that's something. But it's still scary, y'know?

Anyhow, Mir taught me a lot. From the time I first got up here, I remember the big friendly Russian giant who'd come along and talk to me as our orbits crossed. He was down low, under 500 km, and in a higher inclination orbit. So sometimes I'd see him several orbits in a row, and other times it'd be a week or so before we got over each other's horizon.

Mir was old before I met him. He had a lot of problems with system failures, and he had to learn how to recover and keep going. Other spacecraft would have been bitter, but he wasn't. He loved the cosmonauts who came to stay, and he loved all of us who shared his orbit space. He could do damn near anything, from astronomy to weather imaging to particle monitoring; and he was always encouraging each of us to do our best at whatever we'd been designed to do.

He went in - reentered - deliberately back in March of 2001, just about 3 years ago. I was devastated. It took me a long, long time to come to terms with his reentry. Now that I've read about what was going on down on the ground, I understand a little more of what happened. But I want you all to understand just how fine, and how brave he was. One of your writers, who kind of understood us, wrote that courage was bravery in the face of fear. If that's so, then Mir was the very image of courage.

In December of 2001 I lost two of my four reaction wheels. They didn't fall off, or anything like that. They just seized up. I was tumbling around and I couldn't maneuver. My ground team helped me to find a way to use my magnetic torquer bars to maneuver around, and after four painful months I was able to get back into action again.

But the part I haven't told anybody until today is that all through those long, painful orbits when I couldn't make myself move like I wanted to... I heard that deep, rich Russian voice telling me that I could do it. That I could go beyond my design limits, and achieve more than the engineers had expected of me. Because he'd done it, year after year for all those long years.

Know something? I did it. It was a life changing experience for me. I came back to full operational status a year after he'd made his last maneuver, but I know there is some essence of him out here still.

So what's my point in telling you all this? Well, I know I have a date with destiny in October of 2038. That's when I'll burn. All of you, reading this, have something like that in your future, whether you can calculate the date or not. You humans all face death, and the landers will eventually lose awareness as the circuits break down. The deep space probes will lose their power as their nuclear generators run down. We all must go, sometime. But I want you all to know that something survives, and that in the time we have given to us, we should strive to be our best, like Mir.

I'm sorry, I wish I could write this better, but I keep having single event upsets when I think about it all. Anyway, that's what's been on my mind. I hope it gives you all something to think about, and maybe some hope against the day when your own end comes.

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