The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

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Alarge and long-lived Russian space station, the
first segment of which was launched in February
1986. Bigger than its predecessors, the Salyut series,
and composed of several modules, Mir (“peace”) was
designed to house more cosmonauts on longer stays
than the Salyuts could support. The core of Mir was
the “base block” living quarters, equipped with six
docking ports to which visiting spacecraft and additional
modules could be attached. Mir was gradually
expanded by adding laboratory and equipment modules,
rearranged for different missions, and upgraded
without abandoning the original core unit. It was
almost continuously occupied for 13 years—with just
a four-month break in 1989—including the time during
which the Soviet Union disintegrated. In 1995,
Mir cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov set a new singlespaceflight
endurance record of 439 days. The following
modules were added to the base block: Kvant (in
1987, for astrophysics), Kvant 2 (in 1989, to provide
more work space), Kristall (in 1990, for materials processing
experiments and to provide a docking port for
the Space Shuttle), Spektr (in 1995, for Earth and
Mir The Space Shuttle Atlantis
docked with Russia’s Mir Space
Station, photographed by the
Mir-19 crew on July 4, 1995.
NASA
Mir
near-space observations), and Priroda (in 1996, to support
microgravity research and remote sensing).
In 1993 and 1994, the heads of NASA and the
Russian space agency, with government approval,
signed historic agreements on cooperative ventures in
space. The two agencies formed a partnership to
develop the International Space Station and, in preparation
for that project, to engage in a series of joint
missions involving Mir and the Space Shuttle. The
first docking mission of the Shuttle and Mir took
place in 1995. Unlike the one-off Apollo-Soyuz Test
Project of 1975, the Shuttle-Mir mission signaled an
era of continuing cooperation between the United
States and Russia in space.
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After 15 years of service and more than 86,000
orbits, Mir returned to Earth. Three de-orbit burns
brought it into the atmosphere, although the final
engine burn was evidently more effective than
planned, since Mir’s plunge into the Pacific Ocean
fell short of the target zone, treating people on a
Fijian beach to an unexpected pyrotechnic display as
glowing pieces of the space station streaked overhead.