Shuttle-Mir

The American Freedom space station program was running high over budget, exceeding its workable size and becoming too complex and too expensive. With new President Bill Clinton in the White House, the word came down to trim the program or it would be canceled. With so much having already been invested, the desire was to redesign the program, looking at new and alternative options. One of these, developed through talks with the Russians, was to use elements of the planned but grounded Mir 2 as a starting block for a stripped-down station. A further cost saving would be to use the well-proven Soyuz as a crew rescue vehicle until a dedicated vehicle could be developed. America would help fund the completion of the former Mir 2 elements and agreed to fly cosmonauts on the Shuttle in return for sending astronauts to Mir.

Identified as Phase 1 of the international program, a series of Shuttle-Mir docking missions were created to give America some long overdue docking prac­tice, something they had not conducted since 1975. It would also give them the chance to gain their first long-duration experience since Skylab almost 20 years before, with a series of American astronaut residencies on Mir. As a result of these plans, several Shuttle flights were canceled and an assembly sequence worked out for what was now termed the International Space Station.

After further political and financial wrangling, as well as some doubts raised on both sides, the Americans and Russians agreed, with the other international partners, to cooperate on the ISS. Eventually, the new plans were sanctioned by the White House and Congress. At last, the Shuttle had a firm objective in build­ing the ISS and the Russians had funds to keep Mir flying. It seems somewhat ironic given their past differences that the American space station Freedom would use pieces of the former Soviet Mir 2 to develop the multinational ISS. Times were certainly changing.

With Mir reprieved, a new cooperative partnership had to be forged, with a NASA team at the Gagarin training center near Moscow and a Russian team at JSC in Houston. The Shuttle-Mir program envisaged a series of flights of Russian cosmonauts as mission specialists on Shuttle missions, for which they only required to complete basic MS training in Houston since they were already part of the cosmonaut team. What is clear, but quietly overlooked, was that for those cosmonauts chosen to cooperate with the Americans, most had far more flight experience than their American colleagues. For the Americans, training for Mir would be significantly different than preparing for a Shuttle mission. Despite some of those selected for flights to Mir having previous flight experience on the Shuttle, they would all have to face an extensive training program on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and Mir systems. Although it was agreed to use English as the default language for ISS, this did not apply to Mir, so for the NASA astronauts (and their support teams), the program of training in Russia included mastering the Russian language and moving to Star City near Moscow for months on end.