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
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