Mir

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mir, the Russian word for both "world" and "peace," circled the Earth for fifteen years at a height where gravity still pulled at 88% of its sea-level strength. On the 19th of February 1986, a rocket lifted off from Baikonur just in time to meet a political deadline: the Soviet Communist Party's 27th Congress. What followed was not merely a space station but the longest continuous human home beyond Earth that had ever existed, a place where cosmonauts and astronauts from twelve nations cooked jellied beef tongue, played guitar, and endured fires, collisions, and the collapse of the country that built them. How did a single orbital outpost outlast the Soviet Union itself? How did engineers in Moscow and Houston turn Cold War rivals into rescue partners? And what does it mean that Mir spent the last years of its life drifting, half-inhabited, while a private company tried to buy it and turn it into a television studio?

• 2. A Station Built to Politics

  ›

  A decree dated the 17th of February 1976 authorised Mir as an improved successor to the Salyut stations. The original design called for four docking ports; by August 1978 that had evolved into a single aft port and five ports clustered in a spherical compartment at the forward end. By 1979, a government resolution folded in Vladimir Chelomei's military Almaz programme, reinforcing the ports to accept heavier 20-tonne modules based on the TKS spacecraft rather than the 7.5-tonne Soyuz-derived modules first envisioned.

  NPO Energia took overall responsibility, with KB Salyut handling detailed design work beginning in 1979. Drawings were released in 1982 and 1983, and new systems poured in from across the Soviet programme: gyrodyne flywheels from Almaz, the Kurs automatic rendezvous system, the Luch satellite communications relay, Elektron oxygen generators, and Vozdukh carbon dioxide scrubbers.

  In early 1984 the project froze entirely. All resources shifted to the Buran spacecraft programme, leaving Mir unfinished. Funding only resumed after the Central Committee's Secretary for Space and Defence ordered Valentin Glushko to orbit Mir before early 1986. The political target was unmistakable: the station had to fly before the 27th Party Congress. When the flight model of the base block arrived at Baikonur on the 6th of May 1985, workers found that 1,100 of its 2,500 cables needed rework. The first launch attempt, on the 16th of February 1986, was scrubbed when spacecraft communications failed. Three days later, on the 19th of February at 21:28:23 UTC, the rocket cleared the pad and the station entered orbit exactly on schedule.

• 3. Building in Orbit

  ›

  Mir's core module was alone in space for nearly a year before its first expansion module arrived. Kvant-1, originally designed for Salyut 7, was reassigned to Mir after technical problems during its development. On the 5th of April 1987 it tried to dock automatically and failed. Cosmonauts Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveykin suited up for a spacewalk and discovered the cause: a trash bag left behind by a previous cargo ship, floating in the gap between the module and the station. After removing it, docking completed on the 12th of April.

  Four of the six expansion modules followed the same mechanical choreography. Each launched independently on a Proton-K rocket, rendezvoused automatically, and docked at the forward port. A robotic arm called the Lyappa then lifted the module away, rotated it 90 degrees, and locked it onto one of the four radial ports, clearing the forward port for the next arrival. Before each new module arrived, cosmonauts had to depressurise the docking node and manually relocate a drogue fitting to the correct port for the upcoming docking. The exception was the Docking Module, which arrived on Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-74 on the 12th of November 1995, carried on the end of the Canadarm and installed via a Shuttle docking. It was the first time a Space Shuttle had been used to attach a module to a space station.

  When complete, the station comprised seven pressurised modules spanning a period of assembly from 1986 to 1996, making it the first modular space station ever built. The Sofora girder, a 14-metre scaffolding structure assembled from 20 segments and bolted to Kvant-1, extended a self-contained thruster block far enough from the station's centre that it reduced fuel consumption for roll control by 85%. Two Strela cargo cranes, each collapsing to about 6 feet but extending to 46 feet when cranked out by hand, allowed spacewalking crews to reach any module exterior without a free jet-pack.

• 4. Daily Life at 27,700 km/h

  ›

  Wake-up aboard Mir was at 08:00 Moscow Time every day. The windows were covered at "night" to simulate darkness, because the station completed 15.7 orbits every 24 hours and experienced 16 sunrises. Cosmonauts were expected to cycle the equivalent of 10 km and run the equivalent of 5 km daily, using two treadmills and a stationary bicycle, because long-term weightlessness causes muscle loss, bone deterioration, fluid redistribution, and a weakening of the immune system.

  NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, who flew on Mir in 1997, found that ground controllers had scheduled every second of his time, and he eventually began reordering his tasks in a sequence he felt was less fatiguing. He noted that his Russian crewmates did not improvise in this way, and as a physician he observed what he believed were stress effects on them from following the itinerary without deviation. Shannon Lucid, who set the US record for time in space with her 188-day mission, compared the experience to working at an Antarctic outpost: isolated, and genuinely on your own.

  Meals were prepared before flight in consultation with a dietitian, targeting roughly 300 grams of protein, 130 grams of fat, and 330 grams of carbohydrates per day. Unlike the ISS, Mir carried cognac and vodka for special occasions. The two crew quarters, called Kayutkas, were phonebooth-sized boxes in the core module, each fitted with a tethered sleeping bag and a porthole. Visiting crew members attached a sleeping bag to any available wall space.

  By the 1990s, researchers had identified 90 species of micro-organisms living inside the station. By 2001 that count had reached 140. Moulds grew behind panels and inside air-conditioning equipment, producing acids that degraded metal, glass, and rubber, and generating a foul smell that visitors consistently reported as their strongest first impression of the station.

• 5. Cold War Rivals, Shared Orbit

  ›

  In June 1992, US president George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed an agreement to cooperate on space exploration. The timing was not coincidental: the Soviet Union had dissolved seven months earlier, Russia's post-Soviet economy was in chaos, and the planned Mir-2 replacement station had been cancelled even though its base block, DOS-8, had already been built. NASA's own planned station Freedom had never advanced beyond mock-ups.

  In September 1993, US vice president Al Gore Jr. and Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for what would become the International Space Station, and agreed that the United States would join the Mir programme in the meantime as "Phase One" of the joint project. The goals were explicit: let American astronauts learn Russian long-duration spaceflight techniques, and build the cooperative habits that Phase Two, building the ISS together, would require.

  The Shuttle-Mir programme ran from 1994 to 1998. Eleven Space Shuttle missions, a joint Soyuz flight, and almost 1,000 cumulative days in orbit for US astronauts resulted from seven long-duration expeditions. The first Shuttle docking, STS-71 by Atlantis on the 29th of June 1995, was the first American docking with a Russian spacecraft since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Mir cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, a veteran of the station, became the first Russian to launch on a US spacecraft when he flew on STS-60 on the 3rd of February 1994.

  Not all of it went smoothly. Ukrainian independence cut off the fleet of Soviet tracking ships and raised the price of Kurs docking computers, since they were manufactured in Kyiv. Various Progress cargo ships arrived with items missing, either unavailable or stolen by ground crews at Baikonur. A power failure at the launch pad during the EO-14 launch in July 1993 was followed an hour later by a failure of the power supply to the nearby city of Leninsk. The partnership that built the ISS was forged in conditions that were genuinely difficult.

• 6. Crisis at Altitude

  ›

  On the 23rd of February 1997, during EO-23, a Vika solid-fuel oxygen canister malfunctioned and started the most severe fire ever recorded aboard an orbiting spacecraft. Commander Vasili Tsibliyev and flight engineer Aleksandr Lazutkin, along with astronaut Jerry Linenger, faced that fire alongside simultaneous failures of multiple station systems, a near collision with Progress M-33 during a long-range TORU manual docking test, and a complete loss of station electrical power that left Mir tumbling without attitude control.

  Four months later, on the 25th of June, astronaut Michael Foale was aboard during a second TORU test when Progress M-34 struck the solar arrays on the Spektr module and then crashed into the module's outer shell, puncturing it. The station began to lose pressure. Foale and the crew cut the cables connected to Spektr and sealed its hatch; the action stabilised the rest of the station's atmosphere, but Spektr, which contained Foale's experiments and personal effects, dropped to a vacuum. Four of Spektr's solar arrays, which had been supplying roughly half the station's power, were now isolated from the electrical system.

  EO-24 commander Anatoly Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov later conducted a risky internal spacewalk into the depressurised Spektr module, threading cables through a specially designed hatch to restore some of the lost power. Foale and Solovyev then conducted a 6-hour EVA outside the module to inspect the hull. The US Congress and NASA debated whether to end American participation. NASA administrator Daniel Goldin decided to continue. David Wolf, the next US astronaut to arrive, spent 119 days aboard with the EO-24 crew before being replaced by Andy Thomas, whose flight on STS-91 in 1998 was the final Shuttle-Mir mission.

• 7. The Long Farewell

  ›

  On the 2nd of July 1998, Roskosmos director Yuri Koptev announced that Mir would be deorbited in June 1999, citing a lack of funding. The station had already outlasted its planned five-year operational lifespan by a decade. Delays to the ISS service module Zvezda later pushed the deorbit date back, and in 2000 a privately funded mission by the company MirCorp launched Soyuz TM-30 on the 4th of April, carrying Sergei Zalyotin and Aleksandr Kaleri to the station for two months to demonstrate that Mir could be made operational again. There were briefly serious discussions about selling it to private interests for use as an orbital television studio.

  The last crew departed on the 28th of August 1999, having spent the final weeks of EO-27 methodically mothballing each module in turn, starting with the docking module. Their continuous occupation had lasted eight days short of ten years. The control moment gyroscopes and main computer were shut down on the 7th of September, leaving a Progress cargo spacecraft to maintain the station's orbit and manage its gradual decay.

  The deorbit sequence on the 23rd of March 2001 unfolded in three burns by Progress M1-5, a modified resupply ship carrying 2.5 times its normal fuel load in place of supplies. The final burn ignited at 05:08 UTC and lasted more than 22 minutes. Atmospheric reentry began near Nadi, Fiji, at 05:44 UTC, major structural breakup followed at 05:52, and most unburned fragments reached the South Pacific Ocean around 06:00. The total cost of the programme, as estimated by Koptev in 2001, was 4.2 billion dollars across development, assembly, and operation. Five of the ten longest human spaceflights ever recorded had taken place on board.