MOSCOW (AP) — Russia may fine two of its own cosmonauts for history’s worst space collision, rejecting the veteran crew members’ claim that Mir’s worn-out equipment was to blame, an overseer of the space station said Tuesday.
A space commission concluded “beyond any doubt” that Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin caused the damaging June 25 crash, which occurred during the practice docking of an unmanned robot spacecraft to the aging space station.
“Personally, we felt pity for the boys, but the facts remain,” Valery Ryumin, the Russian coordinator of the Mir-NASA program, told the ITAR-Tass news agency. “Most likely we will have to fine them.”
American astronaut Michael Foale, who remains aboard Mir, was the third member of the crew at the time of the accident. However, he — like other visiting astronauts — is not usually involved in operating or maintaining Mir.
Lazutkin and Tsibliyev returned to Earth after the crash, which bashed one of Mir’s modules and cost the space station about half of its power.
The conclusions of the commission, which Ryumin said signed off on its report Tuesday, are unlikely to put all questions about the collision to rest.
Skeptics could argue that Russia has a vested interest in finding that technical problems aboard Mir — a cash cow for their struggling space program — did not cause the collision.
“It has been a longtime tradition here in Russia to look for scapegoats,” Tsibliyev, the Mir commander, said after returning to Earth on Aug. 14.
A news anchor for Russian Television noted that the Mir was plagued by breakdowns throughout the crew’s six-month mission. “Such a categorical conclusion that the crew is to blame sounds rather strange,” he said in a brief commentary after the finding Tuesday.
Ryumin, who also is deputy director of Energia — the company that built the Mir and oversees it — said the finding was reached after a thorough examination of flight data. But he would not specify in the interview what error the crew made.
It’s not even certain the decision will stand. The head of the Russian Space Agency’s manned flights program, Mikhail Sinelshchikov, told ITAR-Tass later that the commission has yet to make a final decision and another panel could still overturn it.
A spokesman at Russian Mission Control said ground controllers were unaware of the decision. A call to Ryumin went unanswered.
Russia’s space program has an elaborate bonus system that includes not only hazardous-duty pay, but specific payments for such tasks as spacewalks and manual dockings.
There is also precedent for financial penalties, with cosmonaut Gennady Strekalov saying he was stripped of some benefits for refusing to make an extra space walk from Mir in 1995.
This summer’s near-calamitous Mir accident occurred during a practice manual docking. Tsibliyev was guiding a 7-ton supply ship toward its port by remote control when it started coming in too fast, banging into the Spektr laboratory module and puncturing its aluminum hull.
The Spektr had to be sealed off, causing the Mir to lose nearly half its power.
Some theorized that the Mir crew accidentally stuffed too much garbage into the cargo ship. One Russian newspaper, citing an unidentified source, claimed Tsibliyev failed to properly record in Mir’s computer the extra weight on the cargo ship.
Reports in other Russian papers seemed to exonerate the crew — saying that several highly experienced space pilots also “crashed” the ship in later computer simulations of the incident.
