THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 17, 1997 TAG: 9701180430
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. LENGTH: 26 lines
In space, you can't just roll down the window and toss stuff out. Which is why Russia's 11-year-old Mir space station has come to resemble the cluttered dashboard of an old Dodge Dart.
After a four-month stay aboard Mir, U.S. astronaut John Blaha, a 1960 graduate of Granby High School in Norfolk, couldn't find a small, broken fan that he had removed from a refrigerator. He listed it as lost in space when he moved his belongings into the docked shuttle Atlantis Thursday.
``I have no idea where I let go of it,'' Blaha told Mission Control. ``My experience being on this Mir for four months is we could spend hundreds of hours and find nothing.''
Engineers wanted Blaha to bring the fan from the Russian space station when he returns to Earth next week so they can figure out why it broke.
This isn't the first time a NASA astronaut has left something behind in space. The late astronaut Manley ``Sonny'' Carter misplaced his watch aboard Discovery in 1989. It popped up five months later on Discovery's next flight - weightlessness caused it to float out from wherever it was.