MIR is certainly a technical triumph—in orbit for 15 years and playing
host to 62 people—but scientists in the West are less impressed with its
science. “They’ve done a lot of biomedical research. But the results are not
fully accepted. The way the science was done is not up to the Western standard,”
says Charles Vick of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC.
Peter Norsk of the Danish Aerospace Medical Centre in Copenhagen, who sent
experiments to Mir, agrees that early work on the space station was substandard.
“But when interaction between East and West began, it got a lot better,” he…
