In 1997 the Russian word for peace was a cramped, vibrating tin can filling with toxic smoke while the crew clawed at fire extinguishers bolted to the walls. Yet Mir, which operated from 1986 to 2001, was also one of the great engineering triumphs of the era. This deep dive traces how the first modular space station was assembled in orbit, from the five-port docking node and the Lyappa arm that swung 20-ton modules into place to the docking cones cosmonauts had to move by hand during spacewalks.

The episode covers daily life aboard: 12 gyrodynes humming at 10,000 rpm, mandatory 5-kilometer runs on bungee-strapped treadmills, recycled urine feeding the Elektron oxygen generator, and schedules dictated on Moscow time. It then follows the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Shuttle-Mir partnership that saved the program, the February 1997 oxygen canister fire, the June 1997 Progress collision that punctured Spektr, and the controlled deorbit in March 2001.

• Why Mir was designed for five years, lasted fifteen, and hosted 105 people from 12 nations
• How cables routed through open hatches nearly prevented the crew from sealing the breached Spektr module
• The manual TORU docking test that failed because the Ukrainian-built Kurs system had become too expensive
• Michael Foale and Anatoly Solovyov’s spacewalk inside a dead, vacuum-exposed module to restore power
• What NASA learned from keeping astronauts aboard a failing station, and why it shaped the ISS