Ten years ago today — April 4, 2000 — cosmonauts Sergei Zalyotin and Alexandr Kaleri launched aboard a Soyuz-U rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on mission Soyuz TM-30. It was the last Soyuz mission to the Russians’ Mir space station.
(View of Mir from Shuttle Atlantis during mission STS-86. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)
In hopes that the newly-formed MirCorp space venture would be able to run the station, Zalyotin and Kaleri were sent to repair it. The effort involved not only their Soyuz mission but also two Progress resupply missions with fuel and consumables. They were successful with some of their repair actions, as discussed on this page, and returned to earth on June 16th, but the Mir station was never inhabited again.
Mir re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on March 23, 2001.
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