Well, the last great of achievement of the Soviet Union’s space program has just gone up in smoke, according to CNN.
Just another mundane and pointless fact I had to share.
Cite, please?
CNN reported not more than an hour ago that deorbit is still planned for Wednesday.
For 15 years it’s been humanity’s only outpost on the shores of space. Let us hope that the ISS is up to the challenge set before it.
Lets hope more that they don’t miss. True, the Pacific is a bloody big place but there’s still a lot that could go wrong…
Will this be visible at all to anyone in the US? At least as far as entry into the atmosphere?
This site is providing complete coverage; they’re even sending crews into the South Pacific to observe the re-entry!
Yikes!
You mean it’s not going to crash into Qwasi, Australia? 
Why don’t they just shove MIR off toward the Sun to burn up and spare Earth any danger? Or toward Mars or the moon for a harmless crash landing? Burying it in the Pacific seems dangerous and is not good for the ocean environment.
Why don’t they just shove MIR off toward the Sun to burn up and spare Earth any danger? Or toward Mars or the moon for a harmless crash landing? Who knows, the parts could be useful for future space travelers. Burying it in the Pacific seems dangerous and is not good for the ocean environment.
Moving that big ol’ 120 ton puppy anywhere but down is, unfortunately, a practical impossibility. It’s way deep in the Earth’s gravity well, and it can’t be accelerated hard, or you risk having it break apart. We don’t really have the ability yet to use something like a low-power ion rocket to do the job. As it is, it experiences a certain amount of atmosperic drag (there’s still a little atmosphere up there), so you can’t just leave it alone, either, because sooner rather than later it will crash randomly.
KeithT’s link estimates that about 20 tons of junk will survive reentry long enough to splash. That’s really not much more crap than sinking a big yacht.
Yeah. A big yacht that’s plummeting at a couple thousand miles per hour and burning! 
Oops. I think I was wrong on the numbers. That site says 140 tons, 40 tons of which will splash. We’re still not talking about the Titanic, here.
Yeah. Ain’t it cool?
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention this in my bried OP that my family was living near Quasi when Skylab came down. We didn’t get a chunk of it or anything, but it was quite the buzz at the time.
Think anyone’s going to be diving for a piece of Mir, to be auctioned off on eBay for millions?
Mir became the butt of a lot of jokes, what with the fires and collisions and malfunctions and so on, but I always found the duct-tape-and-chewing-gum spirit the Russians seemed to show in keeping it together up there to be admirable. If we’re ever going to accomplish anything in space (and by “we” I mean the human race in general) we’re going to have to accept that there will be malfunctions and near-disasters (and sometimes actual disasters) and move on without getting into a big snit about it every time.
Ave atque vale, Mir.
I can’t decide if this is an ingeniously original advertisement/PR exercise, or if it’s sadly indicitave of the state of…something, in America today.
Me too. And people (conveniently) forget that Mir was up there and functioning without major incident for far longer than the original design specs called for. It wasn’t malfunctioning because it was poorly designed - but because it was old!
People just don’t trust those Russians.
http://www.channel3000.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-54525020010319-150303.html
“The descent has been pushed back to Friday, March 23. Officials said that is because the orbiting complex has been sinking a little more slowly than expected…
Many nations, particularly Japan, remain concerned that large chunks of the station will survive and possibly fall on populated areas. Officials in Japan are warning people to stay inside so that they don’t get hit by debris”.
I heard on the news that Taco Bell had placed a large target in the south Pacific, along with the claim that if MIR hit their target, everyone in the U.S. would receive a free taco.
Is this true?
Look at Erroneous’ post. It contains a link to the tacobell.com site.
“Taco Bell has purchased an insurance policy to cover the anticipated cost of the free taco redemption should the core of Mir hit the target.”