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Space

The View from Space: The calm before the storm

August 5, 1998
Web posted at: 1:00 PM EDT

By John Holliman

(CNN) -- I hope you got to see the memorial service for Al Shepard last Saturday. CNN carried it, and it provided a chance to see the surviving Mercury astronauts. Shepard's death brought tears to the eyes of Wally Schirra, the jokester of the original seven astronauts, and to the eyes of your space reporter.

Plans are coming together for our coverage of the John Glenn launch in October. Walter Cronkite has agreed to co-anchor our launch and landing coverage and will be with CNN for the duration of the mission from Houston. CNN announced this officially last week, and I must tell you, getting to know the pre-eminent broadcast journalist on Earth is a thrill. He is a generous man with his time and his knowledge, and it will be great for all of us to watch him work the Glenn launch, as well as provide knowledge about the last time John Glenn rode into space.

Some of you wrote to find out how the Mir space station is doing, with no American on board. It's doing better. People who monitor radio transmissions to and from the Russian station say there are some minor problems with the air conditioning, but that Mir is back to being an experimental laboratory, rather than a mechanics nightmare.

The two cosmonauts are experimenting with chemicals grown in the station's furnaces.

Plans for the future of the station are still in some doubt, but the next crew of cosmonauts is on schedule to launch to Mir on August 13. The new crew docks two days later. The next unmanned supply ship will leave for Mir on October 15. It's possible that the next Progress will be carrying a huge mirror. This could reflect sunlight on dark areas of the Earth at night, making the winter seem a little more pleasant. There are some problems with the sail experiment, but the Russian ground controllers are working to solve them by November.

I'm going to Houston next week to talk to astronauts-in-training to build the new space station. We'll get to watch them conduct practice spacewalks in the huge water tank where full-sized mock-ups of space station equipment are being put together. We're planning stories on the current space suits for use in the new station, and we'll talk to brand new astronauts about what it takes to get the job of U.S. space traveler.

Sergei Krikalev, a member of the first crew of the new space station, will help put it together before he travels up to live there. NASA has announced that he'll be on the crew of the first American assembly mission, which launches December 3. On this trip, the first U.S.-built piece of hardware, called Unity, will be attached to the first Russian-built piece, called Zarya.

There will be a series of spacewalks to attach power cords from the outside of one piece to the other. NASA officials tell me that having a Russian who has flown on the shuttle on this mission will make it easier to make sure both pieces of the space station are working properly after they're connected.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.

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