GOODBYE TO AN EXPENSIVE SPACE EXPERIMENT

It was last month that the last full-time crew undocked from the Russian spaceship Mir and glided toward Earth. In so doing, the crew members bade farewell to the rust-stained, rattling, 13-year-old Russian space station in preparation for its abandonment next year.

Moscow's Mission Control will soon switch off most of Mir's systems, including the central computer that keeps the station's solar panels facing the sun. Next spring, Mir is scheduled to leave outer space, burning up in the atmosphere and scattering some remnants in the Pacific Ocean.

Mir's demise will mark the end of the world's longest-serving space station, which has hurtled around the earth more than 77,000 times, hosted 135 people -- and survived more than 1,600 breakdowns, including a near-fatal collision with a supply ship in 1997.

The Mir space station has been a perpetual repair project. It has long cost the cash-strapped Russian government more than it can handle. Some estimates put these costs at $250 million annually, and these costs helped prompt the decision to abandon it.

The Russians are also under pressure from the U.S. space agency, NASA, which has long urged Russia to bring Mir down and concentrate on a new international space station. That station is already behind schedule because of Moscow's failure to build key components. The Russians have been loathe to let go, even though Mir, which was launched in 1986, has far outlived its originally projected life span of three to five years.

The demise of Mir marks the end of an era in a once-proud space program of the once-mighty U.S.S.R.