Fifteen years ago today — May 20, 1995 — the Russian Spektr (“spectrum”) module launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton-K rocket.
(Mir space station, photographed from STS-81. The Spektr module is in the upper right, with the two straight and two angled solar arrays. NASA image.)
Spektr was originally designed as a military outpost for surveillance and anti-missile experiments. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the module was grounded until U.S.-Russian cooperative missions began in the mid-90s. The Russians removed their military hardware, refurbished the module, and installed additional solar panels and several U.S. experiment packages, in what might be thought of as the space age equivalent of beating a sword into a plowshare.
Spektr was mated to the Mir space station and served as an experimental laboratory and crew quarters for U.S. astronauts until it was damaged by a Progress resupply ship in 1997. Mir residents closed off the damaged module and eventually succeeded in routing power cables from its solar arrays into the interior of the station. Because of an air leak that was never located, however, the Spektr module could not be occupied again.
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