Mir

Russian space station. It consists of a core module launched in 1986 and five additional modules launched separately over the next decade and attached to the core unit to create a large, versatile space laboratory. The third generation of Russian space stations (&see; Salyut), Mir featured six docking ports for modules and other spacecraft, expanded living quarters, more power, and modernized research equipment.

It supported human habitation between 1986 and 2000, including an uninterrupted stretch of occupancy of almost 10 years, and it hosted a series of U.S. astronauts in 1995–98 as part of a Mir-space shuttle cooperative endeavour. In 1995, Valery Polyakov (b. 1942) set a world endurance record of nearly 438 days in space aboard Mir. In March 2001 the abandoned station was brought down in a controlled reentry, with the surviving pieces falling into the Pacific Ocean.