Hey, y'all, it's Jonathan, and before we get to today's episode, I've got something I want to say, and that's there are a lot of Russian names in this episode that I absolutely butcher, but none do I butcher as much as I do one that's spelled k v, A and T, because I forgot while recording the episode that in Russian v is essentially like a double you type sound like vodka is vodka. So through the entire episode I pronounced it as kvant when it should be quant, which makes way more sense because it does reference quantum. So just be prepared to hear me mispronounced quant as kvant a billion times, as well as pretty much every other Russian term and name that's in this My apologies, it's my fault, but rather than go back and re record everything, I thought I would warn you up front. And now let's get to this interesting, if not correctly pronounced episode. Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech, and in this episode, we are continuing our history about space stations. We are going to focus on mirror. So in the last episode, I talked about the first space station, the Salut one UH that was from the Soviet Union, plus other stations in the Saliot line, some of which were secretly military reconnaissance space stations that were masquerading as civilian science stations. Pretty sneaky, those Soviets. I also talked about the sky Lab space station, which was inhabited for just one seventy one days but had been in orbit for two thousand, two hundred forty nine days, and I touched on this in the last episode. But the reason sky Lab was unoccupied for most of the time it was orbiting Earth is that NASA no longer really had access to launch vehicles and space capsules that could, you know, visit the station. They didn't. They physically didn't have the equipment or the budget needed to send more missions to sky Lab, and was essentially waiting on the Space Shuttle program to come online to go back to sky Lab. But the Space Shuttle program was delayed to the point where sky Lab could no longer maintain orbit, and it re entered Earth's atmosphere in the summer of seventy nine. But we've got a lot more to talk about when it comes to space stations, and now we're going to pop back over to the then Soviet Union. So sky Lab came down in seventy nine, and the last of the Saliot stations, Saliot seven, entered orbit in nine two and would remain in orbit until now. While sal Yot seven was an orbit, a new Soviet space station would take form in space, and that station was Mirror M I R. Now, just as a reminder, before Mirror, all space stations were what we call monolithic in form. Now that means that they went up fully assembled in in one big piece, you know, kind of like they were a one piece space station, even though if you break it down, they're actually made up of many many pieces, but it's all, you know, pre assembled. Mirror would take the next step forward. It would be the first modular space station, meaning the station would ultimately be made up of multiple modules which would then connect to a core module out in space. Uh. There's a lot of benefits to this particular approach, but the big one is that you're not as limited on internal space inside your station, and you're not limited by mass the way you would be with a monolithic design line. So let's get into physics for a second to really understand why this is a big deal. So Isaac Newton that smarty Pants mathematically demonstrated the concept of an exchange of momentum in the sixteen hundreds, and a few centuries later a Russian scientist named Konstantine Soolkovski applied the idea of conservational momentum to rockets. This was in nineteen o three, and that became the basis of all of our rocketry moving forward. And there are three big things you have to keep in mind when you're trying to launch something into space using a rocket. Those three things are the energy that you need to generate in order to work against gravity, which in most rocket equations we represent with the delta V to indicate rocket velocity. The value of this depends on where you're planning on going. If you're going to Mars, then you'll need to exert more energy than if you were just going into low Earth orbit. Once you've selected where you're going and where you're starting from, the value of this variable solidifies. There's nothing we can do to change that number. This is literally physics. It's the amount of energy needed to get into that part from wherever you are. Also, it takes about twice the amount of energy to go from Earth to Mars as it would take to go from Earth to Earth orbit. However, what's really interesting to me is just getting into orbit is about half of that total energy to get to Mars, because just overcoming Earth's gravity and not falling back to the planet requires a lot of energy. So while it takes more energy to get to Mars that it does to get to low Earth orbit, just getting to lower Earth orbit is hard. Then you've got how much energy is available in your propellant, right, how much potential energy is stored in the fuel you are using. Not all propellants are equal in this, Some are more dense in energy than others. But again we're limited here. The rockets we use rely on chemical reactions. There is a limit to how much energy we can release out of these chemical reactions. Physics dictates it we can't go beyond that, so again reality has limited us. And finally, you've got the propellant mass fraction, which is how much propellant you need in comparison with the total mass of the stuff you're sending off into space. Your rocket. So we've decided where we want to go, you know, like low Earth orbit, and we've decided which propellant we're going to use to get there. And those two factors tell us the limitations we face in getting a spacecraft to that point, because it sets the ratio we have to hit between the amount of fuel and the total mass of the rocket. And obviously, as you add more fuel, you add more mass, so you start hitting some fundamental limitations there too. We can't just keep, you know, building more massive rockets. You start to run into an issue with that ratio, or at least, you know, we start to bump up against tough restrictions if we try to do that. And so if we want to build sizeable structures in space rather than just like creating a truly monstrous rocket, the solution is to make those structures modular and then to launch large sections of the structures and individual launches and then assemble them in space. That's what Mirror would do. Now, as I'm sure anyone listening to these episodes understands, the road to developing, constructing, and deploying any sort of spacecraft tends to be a pretty long one. While the first Mirror module would launch in February nine six. The planning for the station began a decade earlier, in the middle of the Saliot program, so Mirror got an official approval from the Soviet government in nineteen seventy six, But that didn't mean it was a straight path from planning to execution. A lot was going on in the Soviet Union, including a lot of citical battles within the Soviet space program. Different leaders within different departments were scrabbling for funding and for authority, and it meant that budgets were shifted around multiple times, which honestly is not that different from how things happen in NASA if we're, you know, really being critical. During the span of years between nineteen seventy six and nineteen eighty six, changes in the Soviet space program meant that funds were pulled from Mirror and redirected towards a different space project, that of the Barran spacecraft. Now I'm not sure that I could do a full tech stuff episode about the Barran, but it does merit mentioned. Also, again, apologies for my pronunciation. It's going to be terrible and that's all on me. But the Barran bu R A n was essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Space Shuttle, a reusable space plane style spacecraft designed to go into low Earth orbit and then to act as kind of a plane upon return to Earth, and most importantly, it would be reusable. Now, that project began in the seventies, with construction starting in nineteen eighty, and here in America we had the space Shuttle program in development at this same time. The Soviets couldn't afford to go full steam ahead both with Mir and Barran, so in nineteen eighty four, the administrators redirected Mer's budget towards Brand's test flights. Now, that could have spelled doom for Mere, but then Valentine Glushko, a Soviet engineer in charge of the entire space program who had been part of some of those political fights within the Soviet space program I mentioned earlier. Anyway, he had committed to getting Mire in orbit by the mid eighties, so he managed to redirect some funds back into the Mir space station program. Brand, by the way, would go on to conduct an unscrewed test flight, so no one was aboard, but it was successful. It happened without really a hitch in, but it didn't really do anything else. And uh, the big reason for that had nothing to do with the technology. It had everything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a few years after getting the thumbs up, the Soviets planned to merge Mirror with the Almah's program. Now, if you listen to our previous episode in this series, you know that Almah's was the designation for a Soviet military space station project. Alma's had previously merged, you know, with Saliot stations to three and five. In the Saliot program, we're all meant to act as military reconnaissance stations. Now, Saliott too had had multiple technical problems that led to it re entering their atmosphere just a couple of weeks after it first attained orbit. Fortunately, there were no people aboard. No crew had visited the space station at that point, so no one was lost as a result of that. Sellot three and saw It five had a little more success, though very little is known about those stations because the Soviets were not super eager to share military secrets with the rest of the world. That's not to say that there aren't resources out there. There are. I just find a lot of them to be questionably reliable. Anyway, as part of the Alma's program, engineers designed a spacecraft with the designation d O s so d OS one was actually used to serve as the Saliot one space station. D OS two, three, and four were Saliot two, three and five respectively, Salut six and seven were DUS five and US six, and then the core of the Mirror module would be DOS seven. So this was a case of the engineers taking the designs for an earlier space station and then involving them to allow for that modular approach. DOES or d OS seven would be the core module, the heart and soul of Mirror. This core module would also serve as crew quarters. In fact, for a while, this would be the entirety of the space station. It actually had six docking ports, which allowed not just Soya's capsules to dock, but also cargo ships. Or they would serve as the connection point for other Mirror modules, and each module could focus on the specific type of science. For example, the Kavant one module had equipment to study astrophysics from the station, and we'll talk more about that in a in a little bit. So as for the name Mirror, you might wonder what that means. Well, because you know salute means salute for example, So what does mirror mean. It's actually a little tricky to translate into English. Now you could say it translates to the English word for world, or that it translates into the word for peace, but it's actually more specific than that. So prior or to eighteen sixty one, Russia operated under a serfdom structure with lots of Russians as surfs, and approximately one third of all Russians were serfs. But Czar Alexander the Second decreed that all surfs were freed. That that also meant they were free to pay rent to their landlords. Uh, the word mirror means a peasant community that owned its own land, when previously it did not have that ownership. So there are a few contextual, subtle things going on with that name that are difficult to capture with a single word in English. So, despite all the obstacles, the U S s R launched Mir's core module on February twenty, nineteen eighties six. This was an unscrewed mission to get the core into orbit and it was successful, so no cosmonauts were aboard at this point, but it did deploy from its launch vehicle and enter a bit. The core module resembled the monolithic space stations of the Saliot era. I mean, after all, they were both based off the same seed, the Alma's military platform. And it measured about forty three ft or thirteen meters in length, and the widest part of the stepped cylinder, you know, some parts of the cylinder were wider than the others, but the widest part was thirteen point eight feet in diameter or four point two meters. On either end of the station were docking points, and at the forward end. There were four more docking points around the circumference of the station, so six in total. As I said, just a couple of weeks after the core module innered orbit, a space craft, a Soyu spacecraft carrying Vladimir Solovyov and Leonard Kidzen docked with the station. Actually first it docked with Mirror for fifty five days. So they docked with me Or for fifty five days. Then they left Mirror and they went to dock with Saliot seven, which allowed the cosmonauts to load equipment from Saliot seven into their soyus T spacecraft, and then they carried that back to Mirror after spending about two months aboard Saliot seven. And each of these trips between space stations took about twenty nine hours to travel, so more than a full day to get from one to the other, and they did it a couple of times. Uh. It was the first time the spacecraft had docked with two space stations during a single mission. The two cosmonauts became the first residence of the Mirror space station. And again this version of Mirror was just the core module, so it was a lot like the Saliott stations. In fact, the first module to join Mere and expand the station wouldn't come online until that first module was the Cavant one, which I mentioned earlier, and it was an astrophysics module. Now, if you look at illustrations is a Mirror when it was, you know, complete, when all the modules had attached to it, you would see how complicated this modular approach could become. Some folks kind of likened it to tinker toys. The Kvan one module connected to the aft end of the core module, so opposite where the Soyuz capsule would dock. The Soyuz capsule docked in the forward side of the station, the Cavant one was attached to the aft side. The kan one module had its own extra docking port in the aft of its module, and it also had a pair of very long solar panels, as did the mir Core. I should also add that while that's the configuration I saw on one illustration, the Russians frequently rearranged the modules of the Mirror space station, so I don't know if that was how it was configured throughout the entire history of Mirror, because it did move some modules around at different times in order to prep space for new modules joining the station. The kvant one module was built on top of an earlier acecraft design, the t K S spacecraft. The original purpose for that type of spacecraft was to serve as a resupply cargo ship for those Alma's military stations, but the Cavant one was all decked out with scientific gear. It had two pressurized compartments in which cosmonauts could work safely, and it also had an unpressurized compartment where specific experiments could take place and in an airlock. According to a few different sources I found, the Cavant one was supposed to dock not with Mirror originally but with the Saliot seven space station, and if it had that would have made Saliot seven the first modular space station in orbit. But the development of Kalant one was a rocky journey and of itself, and in the process the decision was made to switch it over to Mirror instead of Saliot seven. The scientific instruments uh aboard the Cavant one included X ray telescopes, spectrometers and ultra violet telescope and more. The Cavant one would study stuff like quasars and neutron stars and any of those solar panels. Because the equipment aboard the vont one required a lot of electricity to use, more than what the Mirror core would be able to generate on its own and still provide, you know, important stuff like life support. It also didn't have its own propulsion system, and that made me wonder how the heck didn't manage to dock with Mirror if Cavanton one didn't have propulsion, how did that work? Well, the answer to that question will be coming up right after we take this break, all right, So, how did Cavant one doc with Mirror if it didn't have a propulsion system of its own well. It relied on a special spacecraft called an f g B tug like a tug boat. Essentially, the tug docked with the cavant One and then act as the propulsion unit and moved it to dock with Mirror before it would disengage fly off. The cavat one itself was a variation of the f g B, so both of these were spacecraft that were based on the earlier t K S spacecraft. That meant that with f g B and the cavanton One together, it was too spacecraft joined and one of them was just acting as the propulsion system for the joint spacecraft. The docking a Cavat one Demir did not go as planned. First there was a failure of the control system that delayed everything. Then, after fixing that, there was an issue with the two spacecraft actually forming a solid seal as they docked together. Something was preventing him from locking in. So the cosmonauts a board mir donned space suits and had an emergency e v A or spacewalk, and on that space walk they found out what the problem was. There was a trash bag in the docking ring on Mirror that was preventing a seal with the Cavat one. That kind of raises more questions, but I don't have any answers to them, so I'm not gonna bother to ask them anyway. The cosmonauts removed the trash bag, and then the two spacecraft were finally able to dock together securely. The tug then disengage from Cavat one, but the whole process meant that it no longer really had sufficient propellant to enter into a controlled de orbiting path, which was what the plan had been, so instead, the Soviets decided that they would use a shorter boost to push the f GB tug up into a higher orbit so that it would become a later Earth problem and it would eventually undergo orbital decay and it would re enter Earth's atmosphere on August in an uncontrolled re entry. That those are words that you don't ever like to read. Uncontrolled re entry is not good. Cavanton one would get a lot of upgrades over the years, with cosmonauts adding solar arrays or taking a raise from other parts of Mirror and then installing them in Cavant one, but by the mid nineties most of the instrumentation aboard CAVAT one had long since failed, gone beyond its useful life, and the module was used for and I quote, rubbish storage, which that kind of stings, doesn't it. But before it became a trash pit in space, Cavant one was an active lab and expanded the living space of the space station. It also had some impressive mechanical stabilizers. They used flywheel mechanisms that would allow the space station to reorient in space without having to use propellant and thrusters. Now, the space station did have thrusters and it did have propellant, but obviously you want to be really judicious with how you use that stuff because you have a limited amount on board and it's not easy to bring more up to you. So using these mechanical systems and sparing the fuel meant that you know, you're being much more efficient. It's pretty darn cool. So just using physics instead of propellant really interesting. But the Cavanton one was just one of the modules that attached to MERE. The second one was Prepare Yourself Cavant to this happened. Now this one would provide more power to the station. It also included additional flywheel mechanisms for orientation, and it also had a large airlock, and unlike Cavant one, it had a propulsion system. So to get into the whole development of this about why the Soviets decided okay, after Cavat one, this whole f g B tug thing is a bad idea. It would take way too long to get into all the stuff about that, but essentially it boils down to them saying, well, if we have a propulsion system attached to the modules, we can actually make more use of more space, which makes way more sense than to use a tug to push it into place and then jettison it. So the Cavant Too would be on the first of those types of modules. The cavant To docked with Mer on December at the axial forward port, and then subsequently a manipulator arm on the space station unplugged Cavat Too and then plugged it into its new home, which was on a radio port on the Mere Core module. And this is pretty much standard operating procedure. When modules would join, they would first dock with one part of the station. Then the manipulator arm would end up moving them to its you know, new home. In some cases it was a permanent home. In some cases, you know, they would rearrange later on. The Covant too had shower facilities not too different from what I described aboard sky Lab. Also had a water regeneration system. Water on space stations is a truly precious commodity, and I'll talk about how space stations managed that a little bit later. We'll really talk about it more in the I S. S episode coming up later on down the line. It also had life science and material science experiments aboard the Cavant to and it expanded the space cosmonauts could occupy once again. It gave folks more room in the space station. Now, the next module to join the party was Crystal or Crystal, I guess it's k R I S T A L L THO. I've also seen spelled with just the one L. This happened in now. Originally it carried the designation of Kant three, but they decided to change it up. And this is the module that had one of its solar arrays removed and then later installed in Cavant one. This would be a few years after it had, you know, merged with Mirror. It also incorporated some docking mechanisms that were meant to work with the Barrand spacecraft. So, as I mentioned, the brand program would get the acts before any such space plane could visit Mirror. However, it would come in handy when the Space Shuttle, the United States Space Shuttle, would visit Mirror. We'll get there like vant to Crystal or crystal doctor. I can't say crystal without laughing. But it docked at a forward axial port on Mirror and then got shifted around by the manipulator arm. And it was a module that moved a couple of times during the lifetime of year, usually to allow for some other module to join the party. And it included a resupply of food, so it had you know, food storage aboard this module. It also had industrial processing equipment, so think of something like a space furnace, something that falls into the materials science category. And these experiments would be important for the pursuit of long term space exploration. The idea being that humans in the future might gather raw materials from various sources and outer space, such as asteroids, and then they might process those materials to make useful stuff that they could you know, take advantage of onboard as spacecraft. The module also had had an Earth observation camera, gamma ray telescope and several spectrometers. And then the fourth extension of Mirror was Specter, which isn't just a villainous organization in James Bond movies, and it's actually spelled differently. Specter is spelled spe k t R. It launched in nine But that is skipping over some really important stuff that happened in between the launch of Crystal and Specter. So in n when Crystal launched and the know when Specter launched, in in between that you had a really important event take place. This was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That process really began in the late eighties with various territories within the then USSR declaring independence from the federation, and by late ninety one the situation had escalated to the point that the Soviet Union was no longer a union and it ceased to be Gorbachev, the president of the USSR, resigned and things were thrown into uncertainty across all aspects of the various nations, including the Soviet era space program. Now, the original purpose of Specter was to be military in nature. It was to be a counterpart to the proposed US project of Star Wars, and boy, haudy, I'm gonna have to do a full episode about Star Wars, I think, because that was a heck of a thing. I remember it as being a really big deal when I was growing up and in the eighties, and it was a really controversial subject. It was also a massive failure in many respects, including as a means to deter the Soviet Union from developing long range nuclear weapons, the idea being, oh, if we have a system that can shoot down your nuclear weapons, there's no need for you to keep building more. That logic ended up not being effective anyway. Specter was supposed to be part of a program that would serve as a platform for space based weaponry, presumably to shoot down I C b M s from the United States headed towards Soviet targets, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left the program in limbo. So the partially completed module was left sitting in a shop, and the same was true for the following module called Paroda. Former Soviet leaders had lots of stuff to worry about well outside the space program, and so both of these modules were effectively mothballed for a few years. Then the Americans chimed in. Once the Soviet Union fell apart, America was like, hey, we can help you out. So in ninete, NASA reached out to Russian leadership and offered to foot the bill to complete both Specter and Paroda on the American dime, provided that NASA would also be allowed to incorporate several hundred pounds worth of scientific experiments on the two modules. The military platforms gave way to scientific experiments, including one that would allow scientists to expose experiments to the vacuum of space using manipulator arms attached to the station, and much of the rest of the station got retooled to study atmospheric science on Earth. The Russians agreed to this plan, and they decided they were going to launch Specter in but there were some delays, and this time the delay was because, and I am not kidding about this, the American equipment destined to be installed Inspector got held up in customs. As such, the module was not ready for launch until the spring of nine, and it took off on May twenty of that year. The final module to join Mere was called pi Roda, and it was also meant to at least be partly a military platform for mere serving in a surveillance function, and some of the states in the USSR had provided instruments meant to further scientific studies, but upon the dis aolution of the Soviet Union, Russia was left solely in charge of Mirror, and the other former Soviet states saw their experiments withdrawn from the module. A German multi spectral scanner was added to it, but then all the funding for the program got the Axe and Paroda joined Specter in storage until the Yanks came along and offered to pay for the rest of the construction and development costs. The additional weight of the American experiments on board Paroda necessitated a change in the spacecraft. Originally it was going to carry an additional solar array in the forward section of the craft, but they Russians removed that in order to conserve mass, and it would the solar array would launch on a later cargo vessel and cosmonauts would install it during a spacewalk. The experiments that did make it aboard Paroda concentrated on stuff like studying the relationship between Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, measuring land characteristics from space, measuring the roughness of the sea surface, measuring optical effects through the atmosphere as well as measuring trace elements in the atmosphere, and finally studying how the surface of the sea reflects microwave radiation. And with Paroda mirror was complete. You had the core module and you had the other six modules attached to it. As I mentioned earlier, occasionally the Russians would use the manipulator arm on the outside of the station to kind of rearrange where the modules were. Those aboard the space station would inhabit the core module. They would seal off whichever modules were being moved. And like I said, if you look in illustration to mirror, you'll see how the pieces all connected in various ways to one another to create the full station. It's pretty nifty. I also like that you could be working in an orientation that's ninety degrees from someone else in another part of the station. But because there's not really an up or down when you're in microgravity from your own perspective, it would like the other person was, you know, at a ninety degree angle from you, so their sideways, but they would feel the same way about you, because again up and down a relative. Paroda would dock with Mirror on April twenty six nine and it got to its final location quote unquote final location on the te So something else happened before Mirror was made complete with the addition of Specter and Paroda. And that's the Shuttle Mirror missions. At least some of them happened before that. Now. I mentioned earlier that under Soviet control, mir had a special airlock system, sometimes called the androgynous peripheral assembly system or a PASS a p a S. After the dissolution of the U S s R, there was an interest in building a stronger link between Russian and American space programs, with the US proposing links with Mirror using the newly launched space Shuttle program. So Russia sent an a PASS to NASA, and NASA resaw its incorporation into the payload bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis. The Shuttle Mirror mission had three parts to it. One was that a cosmonaut would join an American crew aboard a space shuttle. That happened when Saragei Krikalev joined Space Shuttle Mission STS sixty that was on board Space Shuttle Discovery. That mission lasted eight days. The second component was that an American astronaut would visit mir That honor fell to Norman E. Thaggard, who boarded a Saya's spacecraft in Russia to rendezvous with Mirror in March of nineteen. His mission lasted one fifteen days total and included the arrival of both the Specter module as well as a visit from Space Shuttle Atlantis. And that was the third part of the Shuttle Mirror program, the docking of an American space shuttle with the Russian space station. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. You know, one thing I haven't covered yet about Mirror is that the crew aboard the space station could fluctuate over time. You could have cruise from one Soyuz capsule mixed with cruise from the previous capsule. Uh, and so there were times where the space station was hosting more people than other times. When Thaggard and his crewmates joined the station in n it brought the total population up to thirteen thirteen folks and only two toilets. Don't worry, We'll be sure to cover the toilet situation in this episode. Before long, however, members of the Mere seventeen crew because they were all numbered by how many missions were visiting the station, so Mere seventeen that crew left the station to return home, and the cosmonauts assigned to the Mirror eighteen mission stayed aboard Mirror. One of those to return home was Valerie Vladimirovich Poliakov. He had been a board Near for an astounding fourteen months, one year, two months, setting a world record that has yet to be beaten. When he joined Mire, he was part of the fifteen crew of that space station, and he left as part of the seventeenth crew, so he was parts of Cruise fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so he had been there for a while. Also. That was his second trip of Tamir. His first one was back in Night when he was part of Cruise Mirror three and Mirror four. He had stayed up there for two forty days on that first go round. Atlantis launched on June twenty nine and carried two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Buderin, who would transfer to Mirror and stay on as members of Mirror nineteen. The Shuttle docked with Mirror two days after the launch, and it went smoothly. It connected through the Crystal Module and the rest of the station, and all ten cosmonauts and astronauts aboard other th in the Core module to celebrate the occasion. The Shuttle remained docked with Mirror for several days, leaving with the Mirror eighteen crew as part of the Shuttle crew on July four, and the Mirror nineteen crew boarded their Saya's capsule and disengaged from Mirror temporarily in order to record the process of the Shuttle departing the station. So we actually have pictures and video of the Space Shuttle departing Mirror because some cosmonauts got into the Saya's capsule and blasted off for a little ways to get those pictures. Once that was all done, the Saya's capsule returned to dock with Miror, and the Shuttle then moved off to conduct a few more experiments before it ultimately returned to Earth. Atlantis would take return trips to Mirror six more times, so Space Shuttle Atlantis visited me Or seven times total. That included a mission that brought astronaut Shannon Lucid to the station as part of STS seventy six. Lucid would set a record for the longest stay in space by an American up to that point, and also the longest stay for a woman. During her stay at Mirror, Paroda would end up joining the station and complete it. Lucid would also plant a crop of wheat, and they would ultimately go from being a seedling to producing seeds of its own. It was the first example of someone taking a crop through the full life cycle in space. The wheat would return to Earth aboard another Atlantis mission STS one. Space shuttles Discovery and Endeavor would also dock with Mirror once each before the space station would be retired. All missions took place between n and During that time, Mirror experienced a major and potentially catastrophic emergency, a couple of them, actually so. In February, a backup oxygen generating device caught fire on the station. Now, as you might imagine, a fire on the space station is incredibly dangerous. According to Russian authorities, the fire only lasted less than two minutes, but those aboard Mirror said it was more like fourteen minutes. He generated a lot of smoke, and those aboard had to put on respirators in order to breathe. Also, they found out that some of the respirators proved to be nonfunctional. Not great. The smoke blocked an exit path to the Soya's capsule, so there was no escape from the station. It made an escape impossible because your pathway was blocked to your one way home. Ultimately, the crew was able to extinguish the fire using like a wet towel and a fire extinguisher, but they had to continue to wear respirators for like forty five minutes or so in order for the smoke to clear out. Another serious accident happened on June twenty seven. A cargo spaceship collided with the Specter module during docking procedures, and the collision created a small hole in the exterior of Specter, which caused Spector to de pressurize. Michael Fole, and American artist inside Specter at the time of this crash, felt the pressure in his ears change. That was his warning to get the heck out of a dodge or Specter, and he exited the module and the Mirror crew sealed Specter off from the rest of the station. The collision also caused damage to some of the station's solar panels, so the crew ended up turning off some of the experiments in order to conserve power. Fortunately, in neither of those accidents was there any loss of life, and the experiences really drove home the need to develop efficient and effective emergency procedures for cosmonauts and astronauts to follow should the worse happen. The last crew to visit Mirror did so in April two thousand, journeying to an empty Space Shuttle, So the previous crew, which had left in August of actually ended a nearly ten years streak of continuous occupation of the space station. Not continuous with the same people. Obviously you had different cruise coming in and relieving others, but I think it was like a week and one day short of a full ten years of continuous occupation when the last crew had left. Then this space station remained empty and dormant for a good long while until April two thousand and This was from a private space company. Mere Corps was the name of the company. Because funding had run out in Russia to have a state backed space agency focusing on Mirror. At this point, attention was turning towards a different space station, the I S S, the International Space Station, which we'll talk about in the next episode. So the mission that flew up to Mirror in April two thousand was, as I said, a privately funded mission from mir Corps. The two cosmonaut crew was to conduct repairs and reactivate the station, with the hope that private company could keep Mirror in operation. However, mir had already lived well beyond its expected lifespan. The station was going to need a lot of repairs and the investment would be considerable, and with the I S S taking form, it was just too hard to sell, and mire Core could not get the funds to pay for anything more than the first mission in two thousand. So Mirror had run out of time and money, and in two thousand one it would d orbit like sky Lab. There was some worry here on Earth that Mirror might end up crashing down on some populated area, and Mirror was much much bigger than sky Lab, but Russian engineers took steps to have a controlled d orbit, and the station ultimately broke apart above the South Pacific. All Right, I also promised that I would talk about pooping on Mirror. I mentioned that mir had two toilets. One was in the core module, which is good news because you know, it was a while before cavant One joined Mirror and made it a modular space station, and the second toilet was lowcated in covant to Now, if you look at pictures of a mere toilet, you had best prepare yourself for some psychological trauma. It does not look much like a toilet at all. It looks like a canister that has some sort of tube thing in the front of the canisters opening. So to use the facilities, you would position yourself on. The toilet had a fastening system or straining system with restraining bars to keep you sealed to the seat. Very important. You don't want stuff, you know, floating around. We had already had experiences with that in previous space missions. The toilet had a fan to create airflow to help with feces collection, and so the feces would go into collection bags, which in turn would go into an aluminum container for storage. But urine was different. This is where that tube comes in. It was a hose and you had urine funnel adapters that you would attach to the end of the hose, and unlike other space toilets in the past, this one had adapters designed so that both men and women could make use of the toilet. No more of that sexist male only stuff here. It was not a no girls allowed kind of thing, which you know, it was refreshing really Now. The hose would collect the urine and would send it on to a watery recovery system. And you might think, what the what, but yeah, water recovery was a big part of Mirror, and it remains an important part of space travel in general. We need water to survive and there's no easy way to get additional water when you're in space, so you have to make the most with what you have. You want to use what you have as much as you can, and that means you need systems in place to collect wastewater, treat it, and then recycle it for further use, including as drinking water. Now, another use of water on board Mirror was to run an electric current through water. This is a process called electrolysis. The result is that electricity breaks the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Now, this is one way to generate oxygen in space, though it does mean relying on water in order to do that. Water recycling involves moving wastewater through a series of filters to remove all the contaminants, leaving pure water behind, and the I S S would use a similar approach, creating a closed loop system to capture water not just from urine, but also from sweat and even water vapor from breathing. We'll talk about that in the I S S episode. Well, the Mirror space station would come hurtling down in two thousand one, part of it lives on in our next episode, when we do talk about the International Space Station, we'll learn about a module very similar to Mirror's core module that serves as the heart of the I S S. As for what we learned from here, well, apart from all the secret stuff that got buried in Soviet files, we learned a lot about the long term effects that being in space can have on the human body. We observed how the body can change over time in microgravity, including stuff like bone and muscle loss. The things we learned will be crucial should we ever take the step toward establishing long term space habitats on the Moon or on Mars. Not to mention just you know, handling the effects of space travel between Earth and Mars, because that journey alone takes around, you know, more than half a year. So we learned a lot from mirror even beyond, like all the the super shady stuff that the Soviets were doing, or at least the semi shady stuff. Um and and obviously a lot of that learning continues on with the International Space stations. So in our next episode we will turn our our thoughts and eyes and ears towards the I S S and we'll also talk about a couple of other space stations and uh and talk about what the future holds. Oh and I'll also cover the space station that never was a k A Freedom, but that's in the next one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is called tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, y'all, it's Jonathan, and before we get to today's episode, I've got something I want to say, and that's there are a lot of Russian names in this episode that I absolutely butcher, but none do I butcher as much as I do one that's spelled k v, A and T, because I forgot while recording the episode that in Russian v is essentially like a double you type sound like vodka is vodka. So through the entire episode I pronounced it as kvant when it should be quant, which makes way more sense because it does reference quantum. So just be prepared to hear me mispronounced quant as kvant a billion times, as well as pretty much every other Russian term and name that's in this My apologies, it's my fault, but rather than go back and re record everything, I thought I would warn you up front. And now let's get to this interesting, if not correctly pronounced episode. Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech, and in this episode, we are continuing our history about space stations. We are going to focus on mirror. So in the last episode, I talked about the first space station, the Salut one UH that was from the Soviet Union, plus other stations in the Saliot line, some of which were secretly military reconnaissance space stations that were masquerading as civilian science stations. Pretty sneaky, those Soviets. I also talked about the sky Lab space station, which was inhabited for just one seventy one days but had been in orbit for two thousand, two hundred forty nine days, and I touched on this in the last episode. But the reason sky Lab was unoccupied for most of the time it was orbiting Earth is that NASA no longer really had access to launch vehicles and space capsules that could, you know, visit the station. They didn't. They physically didn't have the equipment or the budget needed to send more missions to sky Lab, and was essentially waiting on the Space Shuttle program to come online to go back to sky Lab. But the Space Shuttle program was delayed to the point where sky Lab could no longer maintain orbit, and it re entered Earth's atmosphere in the summer of seventy nine. But we've got a lot more to talk about when it comes to space stations, and now we're going to pop back over to the then Soviet Union. So sky Lab came down in seventy nine, and the last of the Saliot stations, Saliot seven, entered orbit in nine two and would remain in orbit until now. While sal Yot seven was an orbit, a new Soviet space station would take form in space, and that station was Mirror M I R. Now, just as a reminder, before Mirror, all space stations were what we call monolithic in form. Now that means that they went up fully assembled in in one big piece, you know, kind of like they were a one piece space station, even though if you break it down, they're actually made up of many many pieces, but it's all, you know, pre assembled. Mirror would take the next step forward. It would be the first modular space station, meaning the station would ultimately be made up of multiple modules which would then connect to a core module out in space. Uh. There's a lot of benefits to this particular approach, but the big one is that you're not as limited on internal space inside your station, and you're not limited by mass the way you would be with a monolithic design line. So let's get into physics for a second to really understand why this is a big deal. So Isaac Newton that smarty Pants mathematically demonstrated the concept of an exchange of momentum in the sixteen hundreds, and a few centuries later a Russian scientist named Konstantine Soolkovski applied the idea of conservational momentum to rockets. This was in nineteen o three, and that became the basis of all of our rocketry moving forward. And there are three big things you have to keep in mind when you're trying to launch something into space using a rocket. Those three things are the energy that you need to generate in order to work against gravity, which in most rocket equations we represent with the delta V to indicate rocket velocity. The value of this depends on where you're planning on going. If you're going to Mars, then you'll need to exert more energy than if you were just going into low Earth orbit. Once you've selected where you're going and where you're starting from, the value of this variable solidifies. There's nothing we can do to change that number. This is literally physics. It's the amount of energy needed to get into that part from wherever you are. Also, it takes about twice the amount of energy to go from Earth to Mars as it would take to go from Earth to Earth orbit. However, what's really interesting to me is just getting into orbit is about half of that total energy to get to Mars, because just overcoming Earth's gravity and not falling back to the planet requires a lot of energy. So while it takes more energy to get to Mars that it does to get to low Earth orbit, just getting to lower Earth orbit is hard. Then you've got how much energy is available in your propellant, right, how much potential energy is stored in the fuel you are using. Not all propellants are equal in this, Some are more dense in energy than others. But again we're limited here. The rockets we use rely on chemical reactions. There is a limit to how much energy we can release out of these chemical reactions. Physics dictates it we can't go beyond that, so again reality has limited us. And finally, you've got the propellant mass fraction, which is how much propellant you need in comparison with the total mass of the stuff you're sending off into space. Your rocket. So we've decided where we want to go, you know, like low Earth orbit, and we've decided which propellant we're going to use to get there. And those two factors tell us the limitations we face in getting a spacecraft to that point, because it sets the ratio we have to hit between the amount of fuel and the total mass of the rocket. And obviously, as you add more fuel, you add more mass, so you start hitting some fundamental limitations there too. We can't just keep, you know, building more massive rockets. You start to run into an issue with that ratio, or at least, you know, we start to bump up against tough restrictions if we try to do that. And so if we want to build sizeable structures in space rather than just like creating a truly monstrous rocket, the solution is to make those structures modular and then to launch large sections of the structures and individual launches and then assemble them in space. That's what Mirror would do. Now, as I'm sure anyone listening to these episodes understands, the road to developing, constructing, and deploying any sort of spacecraft tends to be a pretty long one. While the first Mirror module would launch in February nine six. The planning for the station began a decade earlier, in the middle of the Saliot program, so Mirror got an official approval from the Soviet government in nineteen seventy six, But that didn't mean it was a straight path from planning to execution. A lot was going on in the Soviet Union, including a lot of citical battles within the Soviet space program. Different leaders within different departments were scrabbling for funding and for authority, and it meant that budgets were shifted around multiple times, which honestly is not that different from how things happen in NASA if we're, you know, really being critical. During the span of years between nineteen seventy six and nineteen eighty six, changes in the Soviet space program meant that funds were pulled from Mirror and redirected towards a different space project, that of the Barran spacecraft. Now I'm not sure that I could do a full tech stuff episode about the Barran, but it does merit mentioned. Also, again, apologies for my pronunciation. It's going to be terrible and that's all on me. But the Barran bu R A n was essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Space Shuttle, a reusable space plane style spacecraft designed to go into low Earth orbit and then to act as kind of a plane upon return to Earth, and most importantly, it would be reusable. Now, that project began in the seventies, with construction starting in nineteen eighty, and here in America we had the space Shuttle program in development at this same time. The Soviets couldn't afford to go full steam ahead both with Mir and Barran, so in nineteen eighty four, the administrators redirected Mer's budget towards Brand's test flights. Now, that could have spelled doom for Mere, but then Valentine Glushko, a Soviet engineer in charge of the entire space program who had been part of some of those political fights within the Soviet space program I mentioned earlier. Anyway, he had committed to getting Mire in orbit by the mid eighties, so he managed to redirect some funds back into the Mir space station program. Brand, by the way, would go on to conduct an unscrewed test flight, so no one was aboard, but it was successful. It happened without really a hitch in, but it didn't really do anything else. And uh, the big reason for that had nothing to do with the technology. It had everything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a few years after getting the thumbs up, the Soviets planned to merge Mirror with the Almah's program. Now, if you listen to our previous episode in this series, you know that Almah's was the designation for a Soviet military space station project. Alma's had previously merged, you know, with Saliot stations to three and five. In the Saliot program, we're all meant to act as military reconnaissance stations. Now, Saliott too had had multiple technical problems that led to it re entering their atmosphere just a couple of weeks after it first attained orbit. Fortunately, there were no people aboard. No crew had visited the space station at that point, so no one was lost as a result of that. Sellot three and saw It five had a little more success, though very little is known about those stations because the Soviets were not super eager to share military secrets with the rest of the world. That's not to say that there aren't resources out there. There are. I just find a lot of them to be questionably reliable. Anyway, as part of the Alma's program, engineers designed a spacecraft with the designation d O s so d OS one was actually used to serve as the Saliot one space station. D OS two, three, and four were Saliot two, three and five respectively, Salut six and seven were DUS five and US six, and then the core of the Mirror module would be DOS seven. So this was a case of the engineers taking the designs for an earlier space station and then involving them to allow for that modular approach. DOES or d OS seven would be the core module, the heart and soul of Mirror. This core module would also serve as crew quarters. In fact, for a while, this would be the entirety of the space station. It actually had six docking ports, which allowed not just Soya's capsules to dock, but also cargo ships. Or they would serve as the connection point for other Mirror modules, and each module could focus on the specific type of science. For example, the Kavant one module had equipment to study astrophysics from the station, and we'll talk more about that in a in a little bit. So as for the name Mirror, you might wonder what that means. Well, because you know salute means salute for example, So what does mirror mean. It's actually a little tricky to translate into English. Now you could say it translates to the English word for world, or that it translates into the word for peace, but it's actually more specific than that. So prior or to eighteen sixty one, Russia operated under a serfdom structure with lots of Russians as surfs, and approximately one third of all Russians were serfs. But Czar Alexander the Second decreed that all surfs were freed. That that also meant they were free to pay rent to their landlords. Uh, the word mirror means a peasant community that owned its own land, when previously it did not have that ownership. So there are a few contextual, subtle things going on with that name that are difficult to capture with a single word in English. So, despite all the obstacles, the U S s R launched Mir's core module on February twenty, nineteen eighties six. This was an unscrewed mission to get the core into orbit and it was successful, so no cosmonauts were aboard at this point, but it did deploy from its launch vehicle and enter a bit. The core module resembled the monolithic space stations of the Saliot era. I mean, after all, they were both based off the same seed, the Alma's military platform. And it measured about forty three ft or thirteen meters in length, and the widest part of the stepped cylinder, you know, some parts of the cylinder were wider than the others, but the widest part was thirteen point eight feet in diameter or four point two meters. On either end of the station were docking points, and at the forward end. There were four more docking points around the circumference of the station, so six in total. As I said, just a couple of weeks after the core module innered orbit, a space craft, a Soyu spacecraft carrying Vladimir Solovyov and Leonard Kidzen docked with the station. Actually first it docked with Mirror for fifty five days. So they docked with me Or for fifty five days. Then they left Mirror and they went to dock with Saliot seven, which allowed the cosmonauts to load equipment from Saliot seven into their soyus T spacecraft, and then they carried that back to Mirror after spending about two months aboard Saliot seven. And each of these trips between space stations took about twenty nine hours to travel, so more than a full day to get from one to the other, and they did it a couple of times. Uh. It was the first time the spacecraft had docked with two space stations during a single mission. The two cosmonauts became the first residence of the Mirror space station. And again this version of Mirror was just the core module, so it was a lot like the Saliott stations. In fact, the first module to join Mere and expand the station wouldn't come online until that first module was the Cavant one, which I mentioned earlier, and it was an astrophysics module. Now, if you look at illustrations is a Mirror when it was, you know, complete, when all the modules had attached to it, you would see how complicated this modular approach could become. Some folks kind of likened it to tinker toys. The Kvan one module connected to the aft end of the core module, so opposite where the Soyuz capsule would dock. The Soyuz capsule docked in the forward side of the station, the Cavant one was attached to the aft side. The kan one module had its own extra docking port in the aft of its module, and it also had a pair of very long solar panels, as did the mir Core. I should also add that while that's the configuration I saw on one illustration, the Russians frequently rearranged the modules of the Mirror space station, so I don't know if that was how it was configured throughout the entire history of Mirror, because it did move some modules around at different times in order to prep space for new modules joining the station. The kvant one module was built on top of an earlier acecraft design, the t K S spacecraft. The original purpose for that type of spacecraft was to serve as a resupply cargo ship for those Alma's military stations, but the Cavant one was all decked out with scientific gear. It had two pressurized compartments in which cosmonauts could work safely, and it also had an unpressurized compartment where specific experiments could take place and in an airlock. According to a few different sources I found, the Cavant one was supposed to dock not with Mirror originally but with the Saliot seven space station, and if it had that would have made Saliot seven the first modular space station in orbit. But the development of Kalant one was a rocky journey and of itself, and in the process the decision was made to switch it over to Mirror instead of Saliot seven. The scientific instruments uh aboard the Cavant one included X ray telescopes, spectrometers and ultra violet telescope and more. The Cavant one would study stuff like quasars and neutron stars and any of those solar panels. Because the equipment aboard the vont one required a lot of electricity to use, more than what the Mirror core would be able to generate on its own and still provide, you know, important stuff like life support. It also didn't have its own propulsion system, and that made me wonder how the heck didn't manage to dock with Mirror if Cavanton one didn't have propulsion, how did that work? Well, the answer to that question will be coming up right after we take this break, all right, So, how did Cavant one doc with Mirror if it didn't have a propulsion system of its own well. It relied on a special spacecraft called an f g B tug like a tug boat. Essentially, the tug docked with the cavant One and then act as the propulsion unit and moved it to dock with Mirror before it would disengage fly off. The cavat one itself was a variation of the f g B, so both of these were spacecraft that were based on the earlier t K S spacecraft. That meant that with f g B and the cavanton One together, it was too spacecraft joined and one of them was just acting as the propulsion system for the joint spacecraft. The docking a Cavat one Demir did not go as planned. First there was a failure of the control system that delayed everything. Then, after fixing that, there was an issue with the two spacecraft actually forming a solid seal as they docked together. Something was preventing him from locking in. So the cosmonauts a board mir donned space suits and had an emergency e v A or spacewalk, and on that space walk they found out what the problem was. There was a trash bag in the docking ring on Mirror that was preventing a seal with the Cavat one. That kind of raises more questions, but I don't have any answers to them, so I'm not gonna bother to ask them anyway. The cosmonauts removed the trash bag, and then the two spacecraft were finally able to dock together securely. The tug then disengage from Cavat one, but the whole process meant that it no longer really had sufficient propellant to enter into a controlled de orbiting path, which was what the plan had been, so instead, the Soviets decided that they would use a shorter boost to push the f GB tug up into a higher orbit so that it would become a later Earth problem and it would eventually undergo orbital decay and it would re enter Earth's atmosphere on August in an uncontrolled re entry. That those are words that you don't ever like to read. Uncontrolled re entry is not good. Cavanton one would get a lot of upgrades over the years, with cosmonauts adding solar arrays or taking a raise from other parts of Mirror and then installing them in Cavant one, but by the mid nineties most of the instrumentation aboard CAVAT one had long since failed, gone beyond its useful life, and the module was used for and I quote, rubbish storage, which that kind of stings, doesn't it. But before it became a trash pit in space, Cavant one was an active lab and expanded the living space of the space station. It also had some impressive mechanical stabilizers. They used flywheel mechanisms that would allow the space station to reorient in space without having to use propellant and thrusters. Now, the space station did have thrusters and it did have propellant, but obviously you want to be really judicious with how you use that stuff because you have a limited amount on board and it's not easy to bring more up to you. So using these mechanical systems and sparing the fuel meant that you know, you're being much more efficient. It's pretty darn cool. So just using physics instead of propellant really interesting. But the Cavanton one was just one of the modules that attached to MERE. The second one was Prepare Yourself Cavant to this happened. Now this one would provide more power to the station. It also included additional flywheel mechanisms for orientation, and it also had a large airlock, and unlike Cavant one, it had a propulsion system. So to get into the whole development of this about why the Soviets decided okay, after Cavat one, this whole f g B tug thing is a bad idea. It would take way too long to get into all the stuff about that, but essentially it boils down to them saying, well, if we have a propulsion system attached to the modules, we can actually make more use of more space, which makes way more sense than to use a tug to push it into place and then jettison it. So the Cavant Too would be on the first of those types of modules. The cavant To docked with Mer on December at the axial forward port, and then subsequently a manipulator arm on the space station unplugged Cavat Too and then plugged it into its new home, which was on a radio port on the Mere Core module. And this is pretty much standard operating procedure. When modules would join, they would first dock with one part of the station. Then the manipulator arm would end up moving them to its you know, new home. In some cases it was a permanent home. In some cases, you know, they would rearrange later on. The Covant too had shower facilities not too different from what I described aboard sky Lab. Also had a water regeneration system. Water on space stations is a truly precious commodity, and I'll talk about how space stations managed that a little bit later. We'll really talk about it more in the I S. S episode coming up later on down the line. It also had life science and material science experiments aboard the Cavant to and it expanded the space cosmonauts could occupy once again. It gave folks more room in the space station. Now, the next module to join the party was Crystal or Crystal, I guess it's k R I S T A L L THO. I've also seen spelled with just the one L. This happened in now. Originally it carried the designation of Kant three, but they decided to change it up. And this is the module that had one of its solar arrays removed and then later installed in Cavant one. This would be a few years after it had, you know, merged with Mirror. It also incorporated some docking mechanisms that were meant to work with the Barrand spacecraft. So, as I mentioned, the brand program would get the acts before any such space plane could visit Mirror. However, it would come in handy when the Space Shuttle, the United States Space Shuttle, would visit Mirror. We'll get there like vant to Crystal or crystal doctor. I can't say crystal without laughing. But it docked at a forward axial port on Mirror and then got shifted around by the manipulator arm. And it was a module that moved a couple of times during the lifetime of year, usually to allow for some other module to join the party. And it included a resupply of food, so it had you know, food storage aboard this module. It also had industrial processing equipment, so think of something like a space furnace, something that falls into the materials science category. And these experiments would be important for the pursuit of long term space exploration. The idea being that humans in the future might gather raw materials from various sources and outer space, such as asteroids, and then they might process those materials to make useful stuff that they could you know, take advantage of onboard as spacecraft. The module also had had an Earth observation camera, gamma ray telescope and several spectrometers. And then the fourth extension of Mirror was Specter, which isn't just a villainous organization in James Bond movies, and it's actually spelled differently. Specter is spelled spe k t R. It launched in nine But that is skipping over some really important stuff that happened in between the launch of Crystal and Specter. So in n when Crystal launched and the know when Specter launched, in in between that you had a really important event take place. This was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That process really began in the late eighties with various territories within the then USSR declaring independence from the federation, and by late ninety one the situation had escalated to the point that the Soviet Union was no longer a union and it ceased to be Gorbachev, the president of the USSR, resigned and things were thrown into uncertainty across all aspects of the various nations, including the Soviet era space program. Now, the original purpose of Specter was to be military in nature. It was to be a counterpart to the proposed US project of Star Wars, and boy, haudy, I'm gonna have to do a full episode about Star Wars, I think, because that was a heck of a thing. I remember it as being a really big deal when I was growing up and in the eighties, and it was a really controversial subject. It was also a massive failure in many respects, including as a means to deter the Soviet Union from developing long range nuclear weapons, the idea being, oh, if we have a system that can shoot down your nuclear weapons, there's no need for you to keep building more. That logic ended up not being effective anyway. Specter was supposed to be part of a program that would serve as a platform for space based weaponry, presumably to shoot down I C b M s from the United States headed towards Soviet targets, but the collapse of the Soviet Union left the program in limbo. So the partially completed module was left sitting in a shop, and the same was true for the following module called Paroda. Former Soviet leaders had lots of stuff to worry about well outside the space program, and so both of these modules were effectively mothballed for a few years. Then the Americans chimed in. Once the Soviet Union fell apart, America was like, hey, we can help you out. So in ninete, NASA reached out to Russian leadership and offered to foot the bill to complete both Specter and Paroda on the American dime, provided that NASA would also be allowed to incorporate several hundred pounds worth of scientific experiments on the two modules. The military platforms gave way to scientific experiments, including one that would allow scientists to expose experiments to the vacuum of space using manipulator arms attached to the station, and much of the rest of the station got retooled to study atmospheric science on Earth. The Russians agreed to this plan, and they decided they were going to launch Specter in but there were some delays, and this time the delay was because, and I am not kidding about this, the American equipment destined to be installed Inspector got held up in customs. As such, the module was not ready for launch until the spring of nine, and it took off on May twenty of that year. The final module to join Mere was called pi Roda, and it was also meant to at least be partly a military platform for mere serving in a surveillance function, and some of the states in the USSR had provided instruments meant to further scientific studies, but upon the dis aolution of the Soviet Union, Russia was left solely in charge of Mirror, and the other former Soviet states saw their experiments withdrawn from the module. A German multi spectral scanner was added to it, but then all the funding for the program got the Axe and Paroda joined Specter in storage until the Yanks came along and offered to pay for the rest of the construction and development costs. The additional weight of the American experiments on board Paroda necessitated a change in the spacecraft. Originally it was going to carry an additional solar array in the forward section of the craft, but they Russians removed that in order to conserve mass, and it would the solar array would launch on a later cargo vessel and cosmonauts would install it during a spacewalk. The experiments that did make it aboard Paroda concentrated on stuff like studying the relationship between Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, measuring land characteristics from space, measuring the roughness of the sea surface, measuring optical effects through the atmosphere as well as measuring trace elements in the atmosphere, and finally studying how the surface of the sea reflects microwave radiation. And with Paroda mirror was complete. You had the core module and you had the other six modules attached to it. As I mentioned earlier, occasionally the Russians would use the manipulator arm on the outside of the station to kind of rearrange where the modules were. Those aboard the space station would inhabit the core module. They would seal off whichever modules were being moved. And like I said, if you look in illustration to mirror, you'll see how the pieces all connected in various ways to one another to create the full station. It's pretty nifty. I also like that you could be working in an orientation that's ninety degrees from someone else in another part of the station. But because there's not really an up or down when you're in microgravity from your own perspective, it would like the other person was, you know, at a ninety degree angle from you, so their sideways, but they would feel the same way about you, because again up and down a relative. Paroda would dock with Mirror on April twenty six nine and it got to its final location quote unquote final location on the te So something else happened before Mirror was made complete with the addition of Specter and Paroda. And that's the Shuttle Mirror missions. At least some of them happened before that. Now. I mentioned earlier that under Soviet control, mir had a special airlock system, sometimes called the androgynous peripheral assembly system or a PASS a p a S. After the dissolution of the U S s R, there was an interest in building a stronger link between Russian and American space programs, with the US proposing links with Mirror using the newly launched space Shuttle program. So Russia sent an a PASS to NASA, and NASA resaw its incorporation into the payload bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis. The Shuttle Mirror mission had three parts to it. One was that a cosmonaut would join an American crew aboard a space shuttle. That happened when Saragei Krikalev joined Space Shuttle Mission STS sixty that was on board Space Shuttle Discovery. That mission lasted eight days. The second component was that an American astronaut would visit mir That honor fell to Norman E. Thaggard, who boarded a Saya's spacecraft in Russia to rendezvous with Mirror in March of nineteen. His mission lasted one fifteen days total and included the arrival of both the Specter module as well as a visit from Space Shuttle Atlantis. And that was the third part of the Shuttle Mirror program, the docking of an American space shuttle with the Russian space station. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. You know, one thing I haven't covered yet about Mirror is that the crew aboard the space station could fluctuate over time. You could have cruise from one Soyuz capsule mixed with cruise from the previous capsule. Uh, and so there were times where the space station was hosting more people than other times. When Thaggard and his crewmates joined the station in n it brought the total population up to thirteen thirteen folks and only two toilets. Don't worry, We'll be sure to cover the toilet situation in this episode. Before long, however, members of the Mere seventeen crew because they were all numbered by how many missions were visiting the station, so Mere seventeen that crew left the station to return home, and the cosmonauts assigned to the Mirror eighteen mission stayed aboard Mirror. One of those to return home was Valerie Vladimirovich Poliakov. He had been a board Near for an astounding fourteen months, one year, two months, setting a world record that has yet to be beaten. When he joined Mire, he was part of the fifteen crew of that space station, and he left as part of the seventeenth crew, so he was parts of Cruise fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, so he had been there for a while. Also. That was his second trip of Tamir. His first one was back in Night when he was part of Cruise Mirror three and Mirror four. He had stayed up there for two forty days on that first go round. Atlantis launched on June twenty nine and carried two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Buderin, who would transfer to Mirror and stay on as members of Mirror nineteen. The Shuttle docked with Mirror two days after the launch, and it went smoothly. It connected through the Crystal Module and the rest of the station, and all ten cosmonauts and astronauts aboard other th in the Core module to celebrate the occasion. The Shuttle remained docked with Mirror for several days, leaving with the Mirror eighteen crew as part of the Shuttle crew on July four, and the Mirror nineteen crew boarded their Saya's capsule and disengaged from Mirror temporarily in order to record the process of the Shuttle departing the station. So we actually have pictures and video of the Space Shuttle departing Mirror because some cosmonauts got into the Saya's capsule and blasted off for a little ways to get those pictures. Once that was all done, the Saya's capsule returned to dock with Miror, and the Shuttle then moved off to conduct a few more experiments before it ultimately returned to Earth. Atlantis would take return trips to Mirror six more times, so Space Shuttle Atlantis visited me Or seven times total. That included a mission that brought astronaut Shannon Lucid to the station as part of STS seventy six. Lucid would set a record for the longest stay in space by an American up to that point, and also the longest stay for a woman. During her stay at Mirror, Paroda would end up joining the station and complete it. Lucid would also plant a crop of wheat, and they would ultimately go from being a seedling to producing seeds of its own. It was the first example of someone taking a crop through the full life cycle in space. The wheat would return to Earth aboard another Atlantis mission STS one. Space shuttles Discovery and Endeavor would also dock with Mirror once each before the space station would be retired. All missions took place between n and During that time, Mirror experienced a major and potentially catastrophic emergency, a couple of them, actually so. In February, a backup oxygen generating device caught fire on the station. Now, as you might imagine, a fire on the space station is incredibly dangerous. According to Russian authorities, the fire only lasted less than two minutes, but those aboard Mirror said it was more like fourteen minutes. He generated a lot of smoke, and those aboard had to put on respirators in order to breathe. Also, they found out that some of the respirators proved to be nonfunctional. Not great. The smoke blocked an exit path to the Soya's capsule, so there was no escape from the station. It made an escape impossible because your pathway was blocked to your one way home. Ultimately, the crew was able to extinguish the fire using like a wet towel and a fire extinguisher, but they had to continue to wear respirators for like forty five minutes or so in order for the smoke to clear out. Another serious accident happened on June twenty seven. A cargo spaceship collided with the Specter module during docking procedures, and the collision created a small hole in the exterior of Specter, which caused Spector to de pressurize. Michael Fole, and American artist inside Specter at the time of this crash, felt the pressure in his ears change. That was his warning to get the heck out of a dodge or Specter, and he exited the module and the Mirror crew sealed Specter off from the rest of the station. The collision also caused damage to some of the station's solar panels, so the crew ended up turning off some of the experiments in order to conserve power. Fortunately, in neither of those accidents was there any loss of life, and the experiences really drove home the need to develop efficient and effective emergency procedures for cosmonauts and astronauts to follow should the worse happen. The last crew to visit Mirror did so in April two thousand, journeying to an empty Space Shuttle, So the previous crew, which had left in August of actually ended a nearly ten years streak of continuous occupation of the space station. Not continuous with the same people. Obviously you had different cruise coming in and relieving others, but I think it was like a week and one day short of a full ten years of continuous occupation when the last crew had left. Then this space station remained empty and dormant for a good long while until April two thousand and This was from a private space company. Mere Corps was the name of the company. Because funding had run out in Russia to have a state backed space agency focusing on Mirror. At this point, attention was turning towards a different space station, the I S S, the International Space Station, which we'll talk about in the next episode. So the mission that flew up to Mirror in April two thousand was, as I said, a privately funded mission from mir Corps. The two cosmonaut crew was to conduct repairs and reactivate the station, with the hope that private company could keep Mirror in operation. However, mir had already lived well beyond its expected lifespan. The station was going to need a lot of repairs and the investment would be considerable, and with the I S S taking form, it was just too hard to sell, and mire Core could not get the funds to pay for anything more than the first mission in two thousand. So Mirror had run out of time and money, and in two thousand one it would d orbit like sky Lab. There was some worry here on Earth that Mirror might end up crashing down on some populated area, and Mirror was much much bigger than sky Lab, but Russian engineers took steps to have a controlled d orbit, and the station ultimately broke apart above the South Pacific. All Right, I also promised that I would talk about pooping on Mirror. I mentioned that mir had two toilets. One was in the core module, which is good news because you know, it was a while before cavant One joined Mirror and made it a modular space station, and the second toilet was lowcated in covant to Now, if you look at pictures of a mere toilet, you had best prepare yourself for some psychological trauma. It does not look much like a toilet at all. It looks like a canister that has some sort of tube thing in the front of the canisters opening. So to use the facilities, you would position yourself on. The toilet had a fastening system or straining system with restraining bars to keep you sealed to the seat. Very important. You don't want stuff, you know, floating around. We had already had experiences with that in previous space missions. The toilet had a fan to create airflow to help with feces collection, and so the feces would go into collection bags, which in turn would go into an aluminum container for storage. But urine was different. This is where that tube comes in. It was a hose and you had urine funnel adapters that you would attach to the end of the hose, and unlike other space toilets in the past, this one had adapters designed so that both men and women could make use of the toilet. No more of that sexist male only stuff here. It was not a no girls allowed kind of thing, which you know, it was refreshing really Now. The hose would collect the urine and would send it on to a watery recovery system. And you might think, what the what, but yeah, water recovery was a big part of Mirror, and it remains an important part of space travel in general. We need water to survive and there's no easy way to get additional water when you're in space, so you have to make the most with what you have. You want to use what you have as much as you can, and that means you need systems in place to collect wastewater, treat it, and then recycle it for further use, including as drinking water. Now, another use of water on board Mirror was to run an electric current through water. This is a process called electrolysis. The result is that electricity breaks the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen. Now, this is one way to generate oxygen in space, though it does mean relying on water in order to do that. Water recycling involves moving wastewater through a series of filters to remove all the contaminants, leaving pure water behind, and the I S S would use a similar approach, creating a closed loop system to capture water not just from urine, but also from sweat and even water vapor from breathing. We'll talk about that in the I S S episode. Well, the Mirror space station would come hurtling down in two thousand one, part of it lives on in our next episode, when we do talk about the International Space Station, we'll learn about a module very similar to Mirror's core module that serves as the heart of the I S S. As for what we learned from here, well, apart from all the secret stuff that got buried in Soviet files, we learned a lot about the long term effects that being in space can have on the human body. We observed how the body can change over time in microgravity, including stuff like bone and muscle loss. The things we learned will be crucial should we ever take the step toward establishing long term space habitats on the Moon or on Mars. Not to mention just you know, handling the effects of space travel between Earth and Mars, because that journey alone takes around, you know, more than half a year. So we learned a lot from mirror even beyond, like all the the super shady stuff that the Soviets were doing, or at least the semi shady stuff. Um and and obviously a lot of that learning continues on with the International Space stations. So in our next episode we will turn our our thoughts and eyes and ears towards the I S S and we'll also talk about a couple of other space stations and uh and talk about what the future holds. Oh and I'll also cover the space station that never was a k A Freedom, but that's in the next one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is called tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.