Mir: A Controlled Goodbye

On a March morning in 2001, Russian flight controllers make a decision no one wants to make: it is time to let Mir go. After 15 years circling Earth — hosting 104 cosmonauts and astronauts, surviving fires and collisions, outlasting the Soviet Union itself — the world's first permanent home in space tips its nose toward the atmosphere and begins its final descent. Today's story is about what it means to say a deliberate goodbye to something extraordinary.

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