MIR was expected to go out in a blaze of glory early this morning, plunging as a fiery wreck into the Pacific 15 years after it was launched - a fittingly dramatic end to a spacecraft that was originally only meant to last for three to five years.
It served its Russian operators well, providing a base for space travellers who broke endurance record after record for time spent in the weightlessness of space.
Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov returned to Earth in 1995 after a 438-day mission, the longest continuous flight. Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev brought his total time in space during three missions to 747 days during 1999, another record.
Mir was never expected to become a vehicle for this type of human achievement, given its relatively short original planned life. Nor could its planners have anticipated it would be visited by US and European astronauts - an example of detente in action.
It was launched five years before the collapse of the Soviet Union and perhaps its greatest Houdini act was to have survived this collapse.
The loss of funding that followed left Mir starved of the money needed to keep it working properly.
Its ageing technology became prone to failures and those that came were high profile, culminating in a series of fiascos during 1997. In February of that year an oxygen-generating canister caught fire, almost forcing the crew to evacuate.
In June a cargo vessel rammed Mir, puncturing a laboratory module that had to be quickly sealed off. Two days later, a main computer failed and in July the station was basically "unplugged" when a cosmonaut disconnected a computer, setting the station adrift. In August, a computer failed during a cargo docking, again leaving the station drifting out of control.
One of Russia's most highly decorated cosmonauts, who spent 11 months on board the Mir, said in Derry he was saddened the space station was due to plunge into the Pacific today, writes George Jackson. He was confident it would splash down safely. Addressing second-level students in Lumen Christi College yesterday, Cdr Alexander Volkov said experiments conducted on board Mir would prove to be highly significant. Speaking to second level students in Lumen Christi College in Derry yesterday, Commander Reuters adds: Mission Control outside Moscow said early this morning it had successfully sent the first of three braking signals needed to guide Mir to a lower orbit and then into freefall into the Pacific Ocean.