Despite attempts in recent years to keep the station in orbit for commercial purposes, the Russian space station Mir – originally launched in 1986 by the Soviet Union – is brought out of orbit with a deorbit burn fired by the engines of an attached unmanned Progress cargo vehicle. The largest space vehicle ever to plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, Mir breaks up over the south Pacific, where any surviving debris is expected to sink harmlessly into the ocean east of New Zealand. The fifteen-year-old station, having been designed with a service life of five years in mind, had been the site of the first joint Russian-American manned space operations since 1975, and led directly to both the contractual agreements and design of the International Space Station.
