Feb 20 1996
From The Space Library
Receiving congratulations from the rest of the international space community, Russia celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Russian space station Mir. The pathbreaking spacecraft had hosted a steady stream of astronauts for long-term stays in space throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, transcending many of the changes in the political structure of its home country. The Soviet space program had launched the first Mir module on 20 February 1986 from the desert of Kazakhstan, but because of Cold War tensions, the Soviets had not released specific information about the station as it entered orbit module by module. Rockets had transported the individual modules into space, where cosmonauts assembled them. The fully assembled space station weighed 130 tons (120,000 kilograms or 120 tonnes). As tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union lessened, Shuttle missions to Mir had become frequent. During the 1990s, many countries, including the United States, had paid the fledgling Soviet space administration, which became the Russian Space Agency, hundreds of millions of dollars to send their astronauts to Mir. Thus, Mir had provided the USSR with a needed source of revenue. However, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program had received only one-fifth of the government funding provided to the Soviet space program. In 1996, even with Mir in an advanced state of decline, Russian officials remained committed to preserving the aging craft's lifespan. Marcia S. Smith, an aerospace expert with the Congressional Research Service, described Mir's state as akin to "a car that has 200,000 miles [320,000 kilometers] on it." Nevertheless, the space station had provided scientists with the only spacecraft in space consistently occupied by humans for a decade, a significant contribution that deserved commemoration.
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