By Andrew Chaikin
Editor, Space Illustrated, SPACE.com

Like an aged prizefighter, the space station Mir has finally gone down. Now come the obituaries. Inevitably many will focus on the station's troubled later life, the years of accidents, malfunctions and near-disasters. In February 1997 an onboard fire roared through one of the station's six pressurized modules, nearly forcing its six occupants to abandon ship. Then, in June of that year, an unmanned supply ship collided with Mir during a docking attempt, plunging American Michael Foale and his Russian crewmates into a protracted struggle to save the station and their own lives. The worst things that could happen in space did happen, aboard Mir.

But the successes of Mir, which means "peace" or "world" in Russian, overshadow its shortcomings. Beginning with the launch of its core module in February 1986, Mir was an orbital construction project that dwarfed anything previously built in space. When it was completed in 1997 it weighed in at 137 tons.

In a sense, Mir represented the Soviet Union's answer to the Apollo lunar landings. Beginning in the early 1970s, having lost the race to land men on the Moon, the Soviets concentrated on a series of Earth-orbit space stations called Salyut. NASA, meanwhile, followed their Moon program with Skylab, an orbiting space station made from highly modified, leftover Apollo hardware. But after hosting three teams of astronauts in 1973-74, Skylab circled unoccupied until it reentered in 1979.

Like its Salyut predecessors, Mir had an edge over Skylab: It could be resupplied by unmanned Progress freighters carrying fuel, oxygen, and other essentials. And with the help of mission controllers, cosmonauts kept Mir going three times as long as the five years its designers had envisioned. By the time the station's odyssey ended early today, it had flown 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers).

But Mir's greatest advantage was its crews. Some 104 cosmonauts and astronauts from 12 countries racked up a total of 4,591 days -- more than 12 years -- aboard the station. They performed 23,000 separate scientific experiments and made 78 spacewalks totaling 352 hours. Again and again, Mir was the setting for new space endurance records, culminating in Valeriy Polyakov's marathon stay of 438 days.

"My hat's off to those individuals," says former astronaut Alan Bean, who commanded a 59-day mission to Skylab in 1973. Living in space for months on end is difficult, he notes, not only because of the Spartan surroundings, but the relentless pace of activity. "You're called upon to perform at your best day after day, and that's difficult to do," Bean says. "Most of us have down times [on Earth]…and vacations, several times a year. And you don't get that on a space station."

Seven of the Mir marathoners were Americans who logged more than two years aboard the station along with Russian crewmates. In that sense, Mir was the direct ancestor of the International Space Station now taking shape. And Mir offers some valuable lessons in how to run an orbiting outpost. "[The Russians] really picked up that expertise," says space historian Asif Siddiqi, whose book, Challenge to Apollo, chronicles the early years of the Soviet space program. "How to keep a station manned. How to refuel it. How to repair things in orbit." And not least of all, how to tend the physical and psychological well-being of the long-duration crews.

Most significantly, from September 1989 to August 1999, the station was continuously occupied. "[For 10 years] you had a human in space anytime you looked up into the sky," Siddiqi says. Mir, he adds, "was the first steppingstone toward the human migration off the planet."

And eventually, Mir's legacy will stretch far beyond Earth orbit. Astronauts voyaging to Mars won't be able to come home when things go wrong. They will have to respond to crises the way their Mir predecessors did when, faced with life-threatening emergencies, they did not abandon their ship or their mission. The Mir cosmonauts took a giant step toward Mars, not only because they provided valuable medical data on the effects of long-duration spaceflight, but because they set a new standard for persistence in space.

There is no question that Mir's end is a loss for the Russians, who rightly view it as the last vestige of Soviet space successes that began with Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight in 1961. Today, strapped for cash and committed to the International Space Station, they cannot hope to surpass Mir's achievements on their own. But they can be proud of Mir's legacy, problems and all. Through it, they displayed the marks of a great fighter: skill, strength and persistence. Mir, and the teams that built and flew it, deserve to be called a champions.

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