Mir's Untold Tales

If you ever flew aboard the Mir space station, you'd know how important it was to urinate on the barbed wire surrounding the launchpad before you went up. If you were especially thorough, you might want to douse the wheels of the bus that carried you to the pad too.

Nobody called this prelaunch ritual by anything like its proper name. What people called it was "checking the laces"--a reference to the practice early cosmonauts had of tightening their space suits' laces before flight. When laces disappeared from modern suits, the checking did too, but superstitious crews needed something to take its place, and ceremonial voiding worked fine.

Russia is not saying much about checking the laces as the wheezing old Mir prepares to end its life in a planned crash, scheduled for Thursday or Friday of this week. The 143-ton ship will re-enter the atmosphere in a flaming arc over the South Pacific, hitting the ocean as a sizzling pile of slag somewhere between Chile and Australia. But even as this final dive approaches, Mir's biographers are working hard to catalog the station's achievements: the 16,500 experiments conducted in its labs; the 600 industrial technologies it helped create; the 104 crew members who called the ship home, one for a record 438 consecutive days.

But Mir's history is more than these accomplishments; it is also a quietly told collection of decidedly unheroic tales--tales of ordinary people living and working in the most extraordinary of places. Only now, as Mir flies its valedictory laps, are many of those stories beginning to come out.

The question virtually all Mir crews get asked--particularly the coed teams--is what they did for sex. The answer? Nothing. The occasional pair of lovebirds was sent up for experiments in animal reproduction, but they usually died before returning. The crews' sex lives were little better, limited mostly to dreaming--something they admit they did frequently and vividly. Eating breakfast in the main module in the mornings, cosmonauts would ask one another, "Dognal devushku?" ("Did you catch up with the girl?") Yes meant that you'd had an especially lusty dream the night before; no meant you hadn't. In such close quarters, no one pressed the question further.

Holidays could be a dreary time aboard Mir, especially for those from the officially atheist U.S.S.R., which had eliminated many of them anyway. On New Year's Eve, crews were permitted to set up a small, nonsectarian tree, which did little to improve the Das Boot ambience. To lift their mood further, they would break out the ship's vacuum cleaner and take turns riding it around the tree--the poor man's jet pack.

Marx may have nixed Christmas, but he said nothing about April Fools' Day, and one Mir crew took advantage of the oversight. On April 1, 1988, cosmonaut Musa Manarov alerted the ground that he had found a mysterious string of numbers written, inexplicably, on the outside of the station. His call was received by Vladimir Bezyaev, a mission-control radio commentator who had been chatting with the cosmonauts and was in on the joke. Bezyaev played it straight, relaying the news to the rest of the control room. "Mission control completely believed [Manarov]," he says. "They even asked him to film the numbers."