No Intermission For Mir’s Comedy Of Errors

The mishap-prone space station Mir was back in its usual state Monday - crisis - after its aging main computer mysteriously shut down, forcing the crew to switch off most of the orbital craft’s equipment.

It was the third time since July that the computer, which keeps Mir on course and its energy-providing solar arrays properly aimed at the sun, had gone on the blink. In the other two incidents, the crew struggled to right the out-of-control ship in semi-darkness while mission controllers sweated it out on Earth.

This time, nonplussed American and Russian space officials quickly announced that Mir’s three-man crew - flight commander Anatoly Solovyov, engineer Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. physicist Michael Foale - were in no danger.

The Russian flight commander called the situation “normal,” while another official said the computer “has become capricious again.” And mission control chief Vladimir Solovyov suggested the crew could fix the problem after a good night’s sleep.

There is one possible reason for the odd sense of calm: Everyone is becoming accustomed to Mir’s new mission as a testing ground for how well humans repair malfunctioning space stations.

“Of course, we learn all the time,” Solovyov said. “This is a valuable experience.”

As the only manned orbital station, Mir is a unique training ground for flying and troubleshooting on the $50 billion international space station Alpha, planned for launch at the turn of the century. Although the aging station may look a bit rickety, its ability to keep flying - despite such cosmic nuisances as backed up toilets, software woes, a stressed-out commander and a collision in space - certainly demands respect for Russian ingenuity.

As a result, U.S. officials tend to put Mir’s litany of recent calamities in a positive light. Or, as NASA’s chief of Mir operations, Frank Culbertson, put it, the U.S. is “getting extremely valuable lessons” from its participation on Mir.

Monday’s lesson began when Mir’s 11-year-old master computer warned the crew it was about to fail, then shut itself off. The astronauts’ efforts to restart the computer were unsuccessful, which meant Mir’s gyroscopes, which normally keep the station positioned toward the sun, went off line. To save power, the crew turned off the space station’s nonessential systems - which, on Mir, means such items as the oxygen generating machine. But within a few hours, crew commander Solovyov was reporting that all systems were normal. It was not clear whether that meant the lights were back on.

A NASA official in Houston said the breakdown was not considered as serious as previous computer problems because, this time, Mir’s solar batteries are fully charged and most of the station’s solar arrays are pointed properly toward the sun.