Mir

Yeah.

Um, and when the Soviets built their, their space stations, um, they, and performed crew exchanges, and they, and then they built the Mir space station.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, what was the feeling in the US about that, since they were once again getting ahead of us on something?

Well, we just, I think the feeling at the US at the time was, well, we, we won the moon race, and we s- flew all these missions to the moon, and so, yeah, so what if you're kinda operating space stations? We had Skylab.

We, we flew three Skylab missions with astronauts on board, so we can do that, too, but big deal, you know.

Uh, but, uh, yeah, they, they, um, uh, they had built Mir, which is pretty, um, an advancement from the Salyut stations and pretty sophisticated station.

And, uh, then when it took President Reagan saying, "Hey, wait a minute, how come we don't have, you know, a space station?" Of course, we had built the space shuttle.

All in all, the Soviet Union had numerous successes and was able to lead the world in establishing space stations in space.

Salyut directly influenced the Mir Space Station and the International Space Station, all of which could not have been possible without the Soviet Union's successes and failures.

Thanks again for listening to this episode of the 10 Minute Universe.

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Akiyama Toyohiro, the first Japanese citizen to travel to space, has died at 84 at his home in Odai, Mie Prefecture.

A veteran journalist with TBS, Akiyama was selected within the broadcaster to board a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in December 1990, traveling to the Mir space station where he conducted experiments and broadcast live reports, famously opening one transmission with the question, Am I on air? After leaving TBS in 1995, he relocated to Fukushima Prefecture, where he spent years engaged in organic farming before serving as a professor at Kyoto University of the Arts from 2011 to 2018.

His journey made him a trailblazer for Japanese participation in space exploration and a distinctive public figure whose post-space life reflected a deliberate return to the land.

Customs authorities blocked a record 19,568 shipments suspected of infringing intellectual property rights in the first half of 2026, a 12% increase from the same period a year earlier, driven by growth in cross-border e-commerce, increasing the overall volume of import clearance applications.

bearings wear electronics accumulate radiation damage software develops subtle bugs that compound over time a spacecraft designed for a 15-year mission is not the same spacecraft at year 12 that it was at year one it is a machine running on borrowed time maintained by a crew that has been performing maintenance for over a decade with a finite supply of replacement parts and no possibility of resupply, the history of long-duration spaceflight offers glimpses of what this looks like.

The Russian space station Mir operated for 15 years, from 1986 to 2001.

During its final years, Mir experienced increasingly frequent system failures.

A fire broke out in 1997.

A collision with a Progress cargo vehicle punctured one of the station's modules.

And that leads to the darkest corners of space biology.

The source material details a confession from Soviet cosmonaut Alexander Laveykin during his time on the Mir Space Station.

Mir was notorious for being a sensory nightmare.

It was incredibly loud, right? A constant deafening hum of fans and pumps.

It smelled of sweat and electrical ozone.

And so then that's what ushered in the next era of space exploration.

And we saw the Skylab and the Mir and the shuttle eras.

And now it's the International Space Station era.

So this is one of science, discovery, collaboration, cooperation.

This allowed for a highly precise and rapid quantification of organic residues present in the water once purified.

The technology was first tested on the Mir space station and later installed on the ISS in 1992.

It was subsequently patented and monitoring has since been carried out using conductometric membrane technology specifically designed for this application.

Although in the late 1980s and early 1990s environmental care was not widely discussed, the foundations established through NASA's proposal inherently carried the essence of sustainability.

One kid would have the plane tracker app.

The other one would have the NASA app for Mir Space Station and all of that.

And, you know, it would be verifying to see.

And nope, nope, that's not a plane.

Soon after Reagan's announcement in early 1986, the communist state launched a new kind of space station, one that would serve as a prototype for the eventual design of the ISS.

Called Mir, this new station had a modular design.

It had different docking ports where additional modules could be added to the base module.

Mir could host residents for much longer than the earlier Salyut stations.

Indeed, some Mir crew members stayed aboard for longer than a year, further pushing the boundary of how long humans had lived in space.

Over the years, Soviets joined more and more segments to the initial station.

These included science labs and observatories, like a module for astrophysics work and another for studying the Earth from space.

Ultimately, the Mir Space Station would orbit our planet for 15 years.

Eventually, the original initiative, which included the US, Europe, Japan, and Canada, was expanded by joining forces with Russia to build the International Space Station.

Before construction began on the International Space Station, the US was building experience with the Russians, flying shuttle missions to the Mir space station and flying NASA astronauts on Soyuz vehicles to long duration Mir missions.

What tasks should a space station perform? Long term, what should the United States be seeking to accomplish in space? In 1985, the sense in Congress was that it was not getting an adequate response from NASA and the White House, so through legislation, it directed the establishment of an independent commission to examine these questions.

Former NASA administrator Thomas Paine chaired the National Commission on Space, which developed a half century roadmap for the US civil space program.

Similarly, the U.S. has excellent historical space relationships with Japan and Canada.

The U.S.-Russian space partnership has roots in the Apollo-Soyuz project of the early to mid-1970s.

The current partnership began in the early 1990s with Phase One Shuttle Mir and continues today with Phase Two ISS programs.

The advantages have been noteworthy.