FW: [FPSPACE] AP Story on Mir comm-loss

[Woods, Dave]

I get so annoyed at supposedly professional journalists who crank out
this sort of material and so misinform the public in the process. Joe
Six-Pack reading this is going to think that somehow the station is
on a taught rubber band that once communications is lost it will
immediately whip into wild spinning cartwheels and plunge directly
to Earth.  The sad part is that this was a common theme throughout 
the media.  Just about every news organization had the same line:
it was going to spin out of control and come crashing to Earth.  The
facts are that it would simply go into free drift, where it is now, but
once it reached its attitude limits it would continue to drift.  Perhaps
up to a few degrees per hour after a few days.  Atmospheric drag
will continue to slow it down as it has been doing, but that too is
a slow gradual process.  Without intervention its final reentry would
be uncontrolled and not necessarily over the South Pacific as is 
currently planned.  But that would be months away: ample time to
send up a crew which is a contingency that has been mentioned.
Anyway, it sells newsprint but certainly does not help to convey an
accurate picture of what is actually going on.  Just my $0.02 worth.

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Dwayne Allen Day [SMTP:wayneday@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu]
> Sent:	Tuesday, December 26, 2000 3:35 PM
> Cc:	fpspace@friends-partners.org
> Subject:	[FPSPACE] AP Story on Mir comm-loss
> 
> 
> ******************************************
> Mir Radio Contact Restored 
> By Vladimir Isachenkov
> Associated Press Writer
> 
> Tuesday, December 26, 2000; 9:10 AM  
> 
> MOSCOW  Russian ground controllers lost contact for nearly 20 hours with
> the Mir space station before re-establishing communication Tuesday,
> allaying fears the accident-prone,140-ton vessel might have spun
> dangerously out of control.
> 
> He said that the information received during the first hookup showed that
> the station had not lost pressure calming initial fears that the loss of
> communications signaled that the station was spinning out of control and
> could crash to Earth. But he did not give any other details.