Atlantis Docks With Mir
On this day · 29 June 1995
When a U.S. shuttle latched onto a Russian space station, two former rivals built the largest spacecraft ever to orbit Earth.
On June 29, 1995, the Space Shuttle Atlantis eased up beneath the Russian station Mir and locked on, the first time an American orbiter ever docked with a space station. Flying mission STS-71, Atlantis approached from directly below along an R-bar path, letting gravity gently brake its closing speed as the two craft met roughly 216 nautical miles above the Lake Baykal region of Russia.
The linkup was a Cold War coda. Two superpowers that had once raced each other to the Moon now joined hardware in orbit. While mated for five days, Atlantis and Mir formed the largest spacecraft then in orbit, a combined mass near half a million pounds (about 225 tonnes).
For five days, the heaviest object humans had ever flown circled the Earth, stitched together from two rival space programs.
The mission also delivered a fresh crew to Mir and brought home astronaut Norman Thagard, marking the first on-orbit changeout of a shuttle crew. STS-71 opened the Shuttle-Mir program, the rehearsal that paved the way for the International Space Station.
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