For two months the battered Mir space station has been as much a ghost ship as a spaceship. Even as its crews have continued to live and work in four of its aging modules, its fifth--the once glittering Spektr lab--has remained dark and cold, ruptured by a collision with a cargo ship in June.
Last Friday Spektr flickered back to life. In a superbly executed internal space walk, Mir's new commander, Anatoli Solovyev, and his flight engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, floated into the airless lab and installed a new cable system that will provide electricity to Spektr and the rest of the...
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