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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Relieved Officials Cheer Safe Docking Mission To Mir Brightens After ‘Perfect Rendezvous’

David Filipov The Boston Globe

Bearing 5,000 pounds of much-needed supplies, a new American crew member and a vote of U.S. confidence in the Russian space program, the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the space station Mir Saturday.

The successful rendezvous 245 miles above Earth brought sighs of relief and applause from U.S. and Russian space officials watching at mission control in the Moscow suburb of Korolyov. In the back of everyone’s mind was the near-fatal collision during a docking exercise with an unmanned cargo craft on June 25 that left Mir crippled and on half-power.

The 12:58 p.m. PDT docking went smoothly.

“We had a perfect rendezvous and docking with Mir,” Bill Reeves, the director of shuttle flights for the National Aeronautical and Space Agency, told reporters at Korolyov minutes after the petallike docking ports of the two craft came together in the dark.

As soon as the hatches swung open, shuttle commander Jim Wetherbee handed the Mir crew a new computer.

“You guys have done a great job up here,” Wetherbee said.

Laughter filled the giant orbiting complex.

And for American Michael Foale, who’s been living on Mir since May, there was this loud, happy greeting: “Mikey!!”

Many of Mir’s designers and veteran cosmonauts were on hand, and some could barely hide their relief.

“Each time there is a docking, you’re worried,” said cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri, who flew on Mir in 1992. “You never get used to the feeling,” Kaleri said at mission control.

Concerns over Mir’s safety caused NASA to wait until just hours prior to Atlantis’ liftoff Thursday before giving the go-ahead for U.S. astronaut David Wolf to replace astronaut Foale on the Russian space station.

“I’m going to like this place,” Wolf said minutes after he floated into Mir.

Atlantis will spend the next six days docked with Mir while Foale and Wolf switch places and while the crews unload the shuttle’s cargo, including parts needed for repairs on Mir that will begin with a Wednesday spacewalk.

Also on board the shuttle are new scientific experiments and a refill of fresh water for Mir’s dwindling supply. But perhaps the shuttle’s most important cargo is the new computer. The old one had a nasty, frequent habit of breaking down.

During his last video linkup with mission control north of Moscow on Friday, Foale displayed the faulty circuit boards of Mir’s main computer, which has broken down every Monday in September.

Each time the computer goes on the blink, Mir’s orientation systems, which keep the space station in position, shut down automatically, causing the craft to spin out of control until the crew can power up, usually a day later. If a computer failure had taken place with Atlantis more than 30 feet from Mir, NASA would have scuttled the docking.

Despite the dangers, NASA tried to keep the atmosphere lighthearted. During the docking, one of the three channels that sends computer information to Earth from Mir malfunctioned, but space officials said it was easy to correct the problem.

Several hours before docking, mission control woke up Wolf and his shuttle crewmates - Americans Wetherbee, Mike Bloomfield, Scott Parazynski and Wendy Lawrence, Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Titov and French space veteran Jean-Loup Chretien - with a recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”

“It’s time to do that delicate dance in the dark and dock with Mir,” mission control’s Chris Hadfield joked.