But, at least America’s first space station didn’t go down without a glimmer of hope. When the new Space Shuttle was being brought into service in the 1970’s, NASA thought about a salvage plan. Astronauts Fred Haise of Apollo 13 and former Skylab crewman Jack Lousma were assigned to a proposed mission of shuttle Columbia. Launch delays dragged on and America’s first space station came crashing back to Earth before the shuttle made its first blast-off. Now, much of what’s left is little more than space kitsch.

NASA identified some of the wreckage that had been found by an entrepreneur in the Australian outback. The pieces were sealed inside Lucite cubes and sold as souvenirs to collectors eager for something that’s been "where no man has gone before."

Where few men have gone, in any case.

Two Americans who got the chance to live and work inside the Russian Mir station have different opinions on what should have been done when the time came to put the orbiting laboratory "out to pasture."

Charlie Precourt was the only American to visit Mir three times. First, as pilot of the famous STS-71 docking mission which brought Norman Thagard back to Earth after his record setting U.S. endurance flight on the station. Astronaut Jerry Linenger later spent four months aboard the outpost in 1997.

"We were thinking of keeping it up there as sort of a museum," says Precourt.

His first impressions of Mir included a "whiff" as well as a view out Atlantis cockpit windows. As the hatches separating Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Russian space station were opened for the first time, there was a rush of cold, dank air.

"It was a musty kind of odor." says Precourt. "It smelled like something out of a wine cellar."

Precourt was also among those in NASA’s Astronaut corp who favored saving the old station, even if it only meant boosting it to a higher orbit until some way could be found to pluck it out of the sky and slap it in the Smithsonian. The Russians, too, were said to be discussing ways to salvage the station as a symbol of national pride.

"We were thinking of bringing back some modules and putting them somewhere where people could see them." Says Precourt. "It’s just not very feasible…boosting it to a higher orbit for safekeeping might be possible, but it’s all technically difficult."

Even the Russian agreed.

Astronaut Jerry Linenger takes a different view of Mir.

"You’re not going to bring it back down, that’s for sure," Linenger says. "You don’t get attached to it (Mir) like a home, I mean. Even down here, if you have your family going with you, that’s what’s important."

This friendly disagreement on how best to give Mir the old "heave ho" is in sharp contrast to the slack-jawed reaction of many Americans when they first saw the Russian space station. Space Shuttle Discovery came within thirty feet of the orbiting station in 1994 during a planned rendezvous. This first close-up encounter came close to failure when a leaking jet thruster on the shuttle left the Russians sounding coy. The corrosive fuel had the potential of damaging Mir’s delicate solar electricity panels. The final "dah" from NASA’s former space rival cleared the way for a modern day version of Macy’s visiting Gimble’s for the first time. For many in the U.S., this was their first glimpse of Mir.

Instead of the grainy and otherworldly snapshots released by the Russians, NASA’s pictures sharply depicted the tinkertoy structure complete with its "forest" of solar panels. As Shuttle Discovery closed in, the compartments slowly came out of the shadows and into view, the whole scene steadily punctuated by the flashing of the single running light on the side of Mir’s main crew cabin.

Even jaded Astronauts sounded like a flying saucer had just landed in their backyard. That list includes Jim Wetherbee, who led that first rendezvous mission.

"As we got closer to Mir…" says Wetherbee, "…I thought to myself, this is incredible! How can we be doing this? This is amazing."

When Atlantis first docked to Mir in 1995, the reaction of noted space artist Robert McCall was even more brief than that.

"I can’t believe this happened." He once wrote.