BBC News Online: World: Europe

Danger from Mir 'exaggerated'

One of the designers of the Russian Mir space station says the danger from debris as the spacecraft plunges to its destruction later this month has been exaggerated.

Leonid Gorshkov, told a news conference that debris from tens of space rockets and hundreds of meteorites annually reach Earth without anything terrible happening.

When the fifteen-year-old redundant station is guided back to Earth, most of it is expected to burn-up in the atmosphere before remaining fragments -- possibly as many as fifteen-hundred with a combined weight of about twenty-five tons -- crash into the South Pacific.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service