Former head of the Russian Aerospace Agency Yuri Koptev revealed the reasons for the flooding of the Soviet-Russian space station Mir. He told RIA Novosti about this.
According to him, constantly occurring equipment failures threatened the safety of the crew, and the technical condition of the orbital complex did not allow its continued operation. “We lost communication, station management, there was a fire. We had a number of failures of fundamental systems that we could not replenish. We were in a situation where we could lose not just the station, but also lose people,” he explained. / p>
Koptev admitted that if today this situation was repeated and he had the same powers, he would have made a similar decision to flood the station.
Mir began to be deployed in low-earth orbit 35 years ago, on February 20, 1986. The complex spent 5511 days in space, of which 4594 days the station was inhabited. During this time, 104 cosmonauts from 12 countries visited the station as part of 28 expeditions.
On January 20, the Electron-VM oxygen production system failed on the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). In addition, the cosmonauts reported an abnormal shutdown of one of the two redundant Russian air conditioning systems.
In September 2020, a leak was recorded on the Zvezda module of the ISS Russian segment, which, according to Roscosmos, provided an overall drop in atmospheric pressure at the station at the level of 1 millimeter of mercury in eight hours. It took more than a month to find and eliminate it. A month later, the toilet, vacuum cleaner and the Electron-VM oxygen production system broke down in the Russian segment.