It also held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the International Space Station on 23 October 2010. Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term orbital research station. Like the ISS, it served as a microgravity research laboratory: the crews conducted many scientific experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, etc.Ĭrews also experimented with/tested spacecraft systems with the goal of developing technologies required for the permanent occupation of space. Mir was also the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station (ISS) after Mir’s orbit decayed. Operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia, Mir was the first modular space station that had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft. Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Space Station Collision – Mir Crash with Progress Supply Vessel () In his video titled “Space Station Collision – Mir Crash with Progress Supply Vessel”, Paul Shillito “ Curious Droid” tells about “how and why the USA-Russia space collaboration started”, too. They took pictures while the NASA STS-71 crew, with Mir-18’s three crewmembers aboard, undocked Atlantis for the completion of this leg of the joint activities. Budarin, Mir-19 commander and flight engineer, respectively, temporarily unparked the Soyuz spacecraft from the cluster of Mir elements to perform a brief fly-around. The Shuttle-Mir program included 11 Space Shuttle flights and 7 astronaut residencies on Mir and helped pave the way for the International Space Station now in orbit.Ĭosmonauts Anatoly Y. The final approach rate of about an inch per minute ended 216 nautical miles (400 kilometers) above Russia’s Lake Baikal region, with a nearly perfect docking, off by less than one inch and one half a degree. Photo: įor the docking, Shuttle Commander Hoot Gibson positioned Atlantis directly below Mir, so that the Earth’s gravity naturally braked the orbiter’s approach “up” to Mir. NASA and the Russian space agency kicked off a new era in international space cooperation in June of 1995 when the Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.