US shares secrets to stop Mir disaster
Tony Allen-Mills, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
The Sunday Times
INSIDE a granite bunker 2,000ft deep in the Rocky Mountains, Major Scott Edwards and his number-crunching crew of military rocket scientists are preparing for a Russian funeral.
In a startling epilogue to four decades of cold-war space-racing, some of America's most sophisticated and sensitive military expertise is being placed in the hands of Russian scientists struggling to control the death throes of the Mir space station, which is about to become the largest man-made orbiter ever to fall back to Earth.
In the bomb-proof, quake-proof underground complex that houses the American military's high-tech missile warning and space command centres, American computers are maintaining a round-the-clock watch on a 140-tonne lump of Russian space junk that could plunge through the atmosphere towards the South Pacific as early as next Sunday.
The long-delayed demise of a 15-year-old prestige Russian project is posing unusual problems for the hard-pressed Moscow scientists fighting to steer their notoriously unstable craft to a safe re-entry position. It also represents a dilemma for American military observers, who are keen to help in a unique technological challenge, but who are also wary of the legal and political fallout should Mir's de-orbit go horribly wrong.