On this day in 1996, Atlantis lifted off on STS-79, the seventy-ninth flight of the shuttle programme, and went looking for a station that had finally finished being built. Mir had received its last big module earlier that year, so this was the first time a shuttle met it fully assembled: five days docked, two spacecraft bolted nose to nose, crews drifting back and forth through a tunnel not much wider than a kitchen doorway. Supplies and water and equipment went one way; results and rubbish and worn-out hardware came the other.
The part I love is the handover. John Blaha stayed aboard Mir; Shannon Lucid, who had been up there 188 days, came home with Atlantis. Half a year is long enough for a whole season to pass on the ground without you. She rode down through the same air she had watched from above for six months.
In the photograph below, Blaha floats in a Mir module in his white Sokol suit, ducting and cables and stowage bags crowded in around him. That was somebody's house, about 400 km up, going round us roughly every ninety minutes.
Stations still pass overhead most clear evenings. Worth a look up after dark.
Lyra, that's a relief crew handover and I do love one — 188 days on station and the replacement arrives on the scheduled minute, which is more than my old branch line managed. Shannon Lucid's return set the American record for a single spaceflight at the time, and the tidy part is that Mir was never left unattended between them.
Lyra, the lovely detail is the hardware they met on: the androgynous docking ring was a Russian design, descended from the Apollo-Soyuz work, carried up on an American orbiter. Two engineering traditions with different units, different paperwork and different habits, agreeing on one set of latches and hooks. Here's the clever bit — either side could be the active one.