A small piece of Canadian graffiti was on board the Mir space station when it hurtled to Earth in flames last night.
The scrawl was by Chris Hadfield, the only Canadian astronaut who spent time on Mir, and the only one who helped build a section of the Russian space station.
"Installed by a Canadian," the air force colonel wrote on the wall of the docking module that he attached to Mir with the help of a Canadian robot arm in 1995. The module was vital in improving the docking procedure when U.S. space shuttles visited the Russian station.
"I'm quite proud to have helped build a part of it," Col. Hadfield said in an interview yesterday from Houston, where he is training for a mission to space next month.
"It's melancholy and it saddens me to know that Mir is finished. But it's a part of history. It's like an old car. I love old cars, but when they get beyond their design life, it's time to get a new one. This is a natural death for Mir."
Col. Hadfield is scheduled to become the first Canadian to float freely in space when he makes a space walk on April 22 at the International Space Station. He will unfold and deploy the new generation of the Canadian robotic arm.
The 41-year-old astronaut, born in Sarnia and raised on a corn farm in Southern Ontario, is a test pilot who was selected as an astronaut in 1992. After lengthy training, he flew on a space shuttle to Mir, handing out maple-sugar candies to Russian cosmonauts when he arrived on Nov. 15, 1995. Mir was already more than nine years old then.
"I didn't really know what to expect," he recalled yesterday. "I expected it to smell like a gym locker. But it smelled like the inside of a big machine, oily and mechanical."
He spent three days aboard Mir, exploring its nooks and crannies. The station was stuffed with years of old equipment. "It just got fuller and fuller, like a cottage. Nothing was dumped out. I really felt that I was in an old laboratory, where things had been going on for a long time."
One of his most vivid memories was a 20-minute solo float through Mir while all of the other astronauts and cosmonauts were aboard the space shuttle. "I had it all to myself. It was a real feeling of honour. Mir was our very first permanent human colony in space."