A photo of Mir taken from a shuttle (STS-81) window.
Click on image for full size
Courtesy of NASA
Changes aboard Space Station Mir
News story originally written on February 18, 1998
The Mir space station crew is about to change. Two cosmonauts,
Solovyov and Vinogradov, will depart from Mir around 1 a.m. EST on Thursday. These two cosmonauts have been on Mir since August! The French researcher Leopald Eyharts will also return to Earth aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. Eyharts was doing a three-week research job on Mir. He arrived in late January.
Andy Thomas, the last of seven U.S. astronauts to work and live on Mir, will stay on the space station with Russian cosmonauts Musabayev and Budarin until the shuttle Discovery brings him home on June 7, 1998.
Thomas is hoping that the crew changes on Mir will give him more space. "It makes it a fairly confined work area, but we're working together and we work around each other," Thomas said Tuesday. "But once the crew leaves, of course, then I expect to have a lot more space available!"
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