MIR

By ANDREW MEIER/MOSCOW

It's official: Yuri Baturin, Boris Yeltsin's bespectacled defense adviser, will take a spin for a week or so on Mir next year. The long-rumored trip is planned for August, during a crew changeover. Baturin, a former staff member at Energiya, the Russian space corporation that made Mir, has been secretly taking lessons in zero-G flight at Star City, the cosmonaut-training center outside Moscow. The competition to join him aloft promises to be stiff. Slovak, French and Indonesian astronauts, as well as a CNN correspondent, have already put in bids. Why would Baturin risk his life in space? Simple: his sojourn is the best Mir advertisement the Kremlin could devise.

--By Andrew Meier/Moscow