The Soviet Union's Mir space station – later operated by Russia – served as an important test bed for how missions should be run over several months. Skip to main content.

KOROLYOV, Russia (AP) -- The Mir space station returned to Earth in pieces Friday, ending its 15-year, 2.2 billion-mile odyssey with a fiery plunge into the South Pacific. There was no immediate ...

Third-Generation Station: Mir (1986-present) Mir was the first permanent space station. The station has been in orbit for 13 years, and staffed continuously for the past 9 years.

As part of a discussion between the US and Russia during the 1990s, it was decided that the follow-up program to Mir would not be Mir-2, but instead the International Space Station. The Russian ...

And while Mir survived several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the construction of the ISS combined with ongoing failures throughout the station forced Russia to eventually retire it ...

On February 19, 1986, the Soviet Union launched the Mir space station. While this wasn't the first space station launched into orbit, it was the first one that had to be assembled piece-by-piece ...

Russia said it lost contact with its doomed Mir space station for almost a day, raising fears that the 130-ton contraption will become uncontrollable when space engineers ditch it next year ...

Our space shuttle docked with the Russian space station Mir. And then we decided to build the International Space Station together. Both countries are needed for operations, the Russians for ...

The record for the longest space single flight is 438 days, set by cosmonaut Valery Polyakov aboard the Russian Mir space station in 1994-95. The U.S. record is held by astronaut Frank Rubio, who ...

A quarter-century later, in 1987, this concept became reality when the Kvant module was added to the Mir core station. - back to the top - First-Generation Stations (1964-1977) ...