In the euphoria of the successful end of this "Shuttle-Mir" program -- officially called "Phase 1" of the even-bigger "International Space Station" project -- there have been many official claims about the benefits of the activity and its positive implications for future international projects. While it is impossible to exaggerate the courage and stamina of the astronauts involved, NASA officials have all too often resorted to overblown hype about how important their work actually was.

A sober appraisal of official NASA claims about the "lessons learned" in the program can reveal some subtle but dismaying patterns. If NASA learned a tremendous amount from Shuttle-Mir, it's mainly because it knew so little prior to the project. That ignorance was often self-imposed and deliberate, and the same cultural mind set is still in evidence. These patterns are the real lessons that must be understood if the Shuttle-Mir experience is to benefit future space projects and future cooperation with Russia.

For example, NASA scientists proudly point to discoveries about the shift of radiation zones in space, or to photographs of the drying up of Russia's Aral Sea, as major scientific benefits of the program. But unmanned satellites monitor space radiation much more reliably than any manned vehicle, and unmanned satellites take much better photographs of Earth's surface than can astronauts. So these claims appear desperate, even pathetic.

Nor are claims about "improvements" in the design of follow-on space vehicles much more credible. While it is true that the Russians found out that for their next space module they had to change the structure of coolant lines (which had sprayed dangerous chemicals into the Mir's cabin air last year), this discovery was unconnected with the presence of Americans aboard Mir. And official assertions that last year's flash fire on Mir forced necessary design changes to future US space station modules conflict with the fact that these "new" design features have been standard since NASA's Skylab space station in 1973.

NASA said it learned a lot about docking to a big space station, and about scheduling astronaut activities in space over a period of months rather than for the two-week shuttle flights. But the docking techniques were developed in ground simulations, and since they went perfectly in space when applied to Mir, they would have gone equally perfectly if they had had to be applied first to Space Station. As for crew scheduling techniques, such details are more efficiently learned in ground simulations, which NASA would have conducted for Space Station anyway.

In seeking a silver lining to the astronauts' dangerous ordeals last year, NASA officials boast: "We learned to work problems together with our Russian partners". They point to the crises when first fire and then a mid-space collision nearly killed American astronauts. Some Washington officials go so far as to call the near-fatal accidents "blessings in disguise".

More level-headed space veterans just shake their heads at such bold talk, since they know that emergencies in space are never good news and are never desirable. Further, noted one 20 year veteran of NASA's Mission Control, bragging that the crises taught NASA how to work problems with the Russians merely shows that NASA approved the flights before it had developed the ability to work exactly such problems. "You learn to work with other control teams during rigorous pre-flight drills and emergency simulations," this veteran noted, "and this must be certified at the flight readiness review. Nobody had any right to allow those flights if this ability hadn't been learned before launch."

Furthermore, during these and other emergencies NASA really had little to do except agonize from a distance, since the Russians themselves handled all the operations and just later told NASA what had happened. The only crisis-related decision NASA ever had to make was to substitute one male crewman for a scheduled female crewman. That choice was made officially because she was too short to use the Russian spacesuit in an emergency, but it also had the psychological advantage that it was a man and not a woman facing the perceived dangers on Mir and so there probably was less public concern because of that.

As to other "decisions" related to safety, NASA showed that all the key decisions had already been made. It was always "go ahead" with the next flight. Since the initial and still dominant purpose of the project was demonstrating a "new relationship" with post-Soviet Russia, other factors -- even flight safety -- shrank in significance.

Normal spaceflight safety standards, validated after the Challenger catastrophe in 1986, call for establishing a positive level of safety by cataloguing all potential hazards and estimating their cumulative probability. In contrast, NASA's current approach, as illustrated in internal briefing charts and explicit public statements, was to assume safety unless danger could be proved ("We will proceed unless somebody proves reasons to stop"). But most of the dangers facing astronauts on Mir were unknown. Either Russia withheld relevant information, or nobody had even checked up on key features of Mir. This checking of Mir's soundness was the central purpose of the presence of Russian space official Valeriy Ryumin on this last shuttle flight -- nobody reliably knew it before.

So the game was rigged from the start. The head of the astronauts' own Safety Office, two-time space veteran Blaine Hammond, objected to this approach last year, but was overruled, and he soon afterwards left NASA.

After the current euphoric celebration and self-serving boasting fade, NASA needs to dispassionately assess what it really learned from this experience. Perhaps the most crucial lesson is that it really didn't have to spend five billion dollars (counting the cost of the shuttle flights, which NASA doesn't want to do) and nearly kill several astronauts to find out most of the things that it's bragging the project taught. NASA's insistance that the project was absolutely crucial ("the only way to learn is to do") merely solidifies a myopic vision that rejects other safer, cheaper avenues for learning all of the lessons NASA needs to apply to the challenges of the Space Station.

Without a pro-active search for useful lessons, either from past experience, or from current analogous projects, or from future ground simulations, NASA risks being caught again and again by surprise by future space emergencies, just as it was repeatedly caught by surprise on Mir.

The time will come for serious retrospective assessment of the Mir experience. For the sake of the International Space Station and the astronauts and cosmonauts who will fly on it, let's hope NASA does a better job this time around than last time.