36 years ago, on January 2, 1985, the USSR government adopted a decree on the creation of the Mir orbital station. This is a multipurpose international center, which for more than 15 years has been the only “space laboratory” in the world for testing and testing the main directions of the targeted use of future manned stations and complexes that provide humanity with access to space exploration.
The project of the Mir station began to be developed back in 1976. Active work on the construction of the orbital station began in 1979, but was temporarily suspended in 1984 – all the forces of the space industry of the Soviet Union went to create the Buran spacecraft. Its first module was launched on February 20, 1986 from the Baikonur cosmodrome, but its construction took ten years. In total, about 280 enterprises, operating under the auspices of 20 ministries and departments, worked on the project.
It was Mir that became the first orbital station built on a modular basis, when other elements necessary for performing certain functions can be attached to the base unit. This principle is also used on the International Space Station. A number of records have been set at the Mir station. But she herself is a record holder. It was originally planned that it will last only five years and will be replaced by the Mir-2 object, but its service life has stretched out for fifteen years. The time of continuous stay of people on it is estimated at 3,642 days – from September 5, 1989 to August 26, 1999, almost ten years (the International Space Station beat this achievement in 2010).
During this time, more than 23 thousand scientific experiments were carried out at Mir. Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, while on board, spent 438 days in orbit continuously (from January 8, 1994 to March 22, 1995), which is still a record achievement in history.