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  • Right now, there are people living and working in an artificial satellite about the size

  • of a football field, zooming around the earth at 26,000km/hour.

  • Which is awesome!

  • But we didn't learn how to do that overnight.

  • There were a few different space stations before we built the International Space Station.

  • And the one that stuck around for the longest was Mir, a space station launched by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

  • Mir was compared to everything from a graceful dragonfly to a hedgehog to a death trap, and

  • for good reason.

  • It taught us a lot and was home to tons of accomplishments, but most days, Mir was also

  • a mess of mold and electrical problems ... even when it wasn't literally on fire.

  • Mir wasn't the Soviet Union's first space station.

  • Instead, it was designed to succeed the Salyut program, which ran from the 1970s to the 80s.

  • Like the ISS, Mir was modular, meaning it was launched in pieces and assembled in orbit

  • over several years, starting in 1986.

  • It's hard to translate its name into English, but Mir means something along the lines of

  • world”, “village”, andpeace”, and many cosmonauts remember it fondly.

  • But by the time Americans began joining the missions in 1995, the station was an accident-prone mess.

  • For one thing, there was never enough on-board storage, and there also wasn't enough room

  • on the ships returning from Mir to carry all the garbage away -- so over time, the place

  • became packed with junk.

  • Then there was Mir's microbe problem.

  • According to some astronauts, after years of people continuously living there, the place

  • got a littlesmelly.

  • Scientists knew the station might have basically turned into a giant, orbiting petri dish,

  • so they had astronauts collect some samples.

  • And it was worse than they ever imagined.

  • When astronauts removed a few instrument panels, they were greeted by floating basketball-sized

  • globs of filthy water, where unspeakable things were growing.

  • The water had gotten trapped behind the panels, and the air back there was nice and warm,

  • making it a tropical paradise for mold, mildew, and bacteria.

  • Besides the fact that that's totally disgusting, it was also a risk to the crew's health

  • in more ways than one, because some microbes could have corroded steel and threatened the

  • structural integrity of the station.

  • Unfortunately, humans are always carrying microbes in our body, so we can't leave

  • all the germs back on Earth, and even the ISS has had some problems.

  • But after Mir, better monitoring techniques were developed to help astronauts stay on

  • top of things, and keeping the station in working order has also helped.

  • Mir had periodic power outages, which helped the heat and humidity climb to those more microbe-friendly levels.

  • Since Mir, we've also gotten a lot better at steering resupply modules, which visit

  • the ISS to drop off supplies and experiments.

  • Once in 1994 and again in 1997, piloting problems caused modules to bump into Mir, and the accident

  • in 1997 was especially bad.

  • Because of some risky piloting maneuvers, there was a major crash that seriously damaged

  • the station's Spektr module, a science lab designed to monitor Earth from above.

  • The hull was breached, and even though astronauts were able to patch the hole and stop air escaping,

  • Spektr was never fully usable again.

  • Now, crashing something into your space station is never a good sign, but there was one accident

  • that was even more dangerous: a fire.

  • A fire in space is a lot scarier than one on Earth, because you can't just run outside

  • and get away from it: You're trapped in a small, enclosed area with a burning inferno.

  • This one could have injured or even killed the people on board, but luckily no one was badly hurt.

  • The blaze came from a faulty oxygen generator.

  • These devices, informally called candles, were about the size of a spray paint can,

  • and they produced oxygen by burning lithium perchlorate, a salt made of lithium, chlorine, and oxygen.

  • Usually, candles are pretty safe, and they're still used as oxygen backups on the ISS today,

  • but this one malfunctioned and burned out of control.

  • It was so hot that one astronaut reported seeing what he thought was dripping wax -- but

  • it was actually molten metal because the fire was so hot.

  • Thankfully, the blaze wasn't pointed at the station's outside walls, where it could

  • have damaged the hull.

  • And the crew had recently cleaned up the mess in the area, so they had an escape path and

  • could put out the fire.

  • Afterward, quality control of the candles was improved so something like this would

  • never happen again, and the ISS now takes multiple precautions if a fire is detected,

  • like cutting power and venting the oxygen in that area.

  • Finally, after 15 years of triumph and chaos, Mir was sent back to Earth in 2001, where

  • it cannonballed into the Pacific Ocean.

  • Even though it had its rough days, Mir was only designed to fly for five years, so it's

  • pretty impressive that it lasted as long as it did.

  • It outlived the Soviet Union and stuck around long enough to see the ISS succeed it.

  • And a lot of the reason the ISS is so successful today is because of lessons learned on Mir.

  • So even though we might sometimes poke fun at that orbiting struggle bus, it also set

  • records, housed countless experiments, and changed the way we live in space today.

  • Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Space!

  • If you want to learn more about early space stations, you can check out our episode about

  • Skylab, America's first space station.

  • And for more videos every week, you can head over to youtube.com/scishowspace and subscribe.

Right now, there are people living and working in an artificial satellite about the size

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