Are There Ways to Make Money off of Mir Splashdown?
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: Russian space station Mir is set to break up and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere next week, splashing down somewhere in the South Pacific. Its re-entry is raising concerns about money and safety. CNN's Jim Bolden explains.</s>JIM BOLDEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Mir splashdown will signal the end of a 15-year odyssey, and one rather out-of-this-world idea to turn the leaking space craft into a commercial venture. This group of entrepreneurs said a year ago, they could make money by spending rich space cowboy up to Mir at $20 million a pop. It didn't work. Now attention is focused where Mir will come down. It's guessed that 30 tons of space junk will slash down somewhere east of Australia. Mir is the biggest thing to ever be returned to Earth, a fact weighing heavy on the mind of the man in charge.</s>NIKOLAI IVANOV, MIR DEPUTY FLIGHT DIRECTOR (through translator): Frankly speaking, every night for the last month, I have had dreams about Mir and how to solve its possible problems.</s>BOLDEN: That responsibility is big enough to prompt the Russians to take out a $20 million insurance policy through Lloyd's of London. But there are still ways to make money from Mir. Fragments of it may hit land, as Spacelab did, and some people are paying $16,000 to fly close to the drop zone.</s>DR. RICHARD CROWTHER, SPACE CONSULTANT: There could be opportunities to make money with the re-entry of Mir. Clearly, there's been a flight chart to go and observe the re-entry, and that in itself could be quite a spectacle. Objects will potentially fall to Earth, and they may be found by people. What we'd recommend people do if they do find something and they think it is from the Mir station, they should report it to local authorities.</s>BOLDEN: Experts say don't worry if some of Mir does hit land. Of the of the 18,000 man-made objects which have come back from space, no one has been hurt yet. Jim Bolden, CNN Financial News, London.