See the Most Remarkable Moments From the Mir Space Station

German astronaut Klaus Dietrich Flade looks at the spacecraft that will take him to the Mir space station, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan on March 17, 1992.

Assemblers, Ivan Volchenkov and Nikolay Petrov, at a de-classified aerospace facility with one of several newly designed spacesuits to be delivered to the mir space station in 1992.

Valery Korzun of Russia, Claudie Andre Deshays and Leopold Eyharts of France during a training session in the outskirts of Moscow on May 31, 1995.

The STS-76 crew took this 70-mm undated picture of Russia's Mir space station over Australia.

An undated photo of the combined crews of Mir and U.S. space shuttle Endevor.

Astronaut Shannon Lucid, who concluded a U.S. record setting six-month voyage aboard Mir, checks on wheat plants on Sept. 23, 1996.

Astronaut Shannon W. Lucid floats through the tunnel that connects Spacehab to the Atlantis cabin inside the Mir space station, on Sept. 24, 1996.

The Mir complex backdropped against the blackness of space over Earth's horizon on Sept. 24, 1996.

Two Russian cosmonauts hold on to a 14-meter girder outside the aging Mir station discarding a faulty thruster engine on April 11, 1998.

French astronaut Jean-Pierre Haignere, part of the last crew on Mir, is carried out of the "Souyz TM- 29" space craft after landing in Kazakhstan on Aug. 28, 1999.

Mir burns up as it enters the earth's atmosphere after 15 years of service in outer space, at over Nadi, Fiji, on March 23, 2001.

A scale model of Mir in its Mission Control center outside Moscow on March 7, 2001. Russian space officials waited until the craft drifted closer to Earth before shoving it towards a fiery plunge into the Pacific Ocean.