Two Russians and a Frenchman travelling 300 miles above the planet at 18,000 m.p.h. will soon step out of their space station, shut the door behind them, board a little space ferry and head for home.
They will leave Mir, the Russian station which was built to last five years but has lasted for 13 and has made more than 76,000 orbits of earth, during the next week.
They will say goodbye to 125 tons of bolted-together hardware, in which there was neither up nor down but which had carpet on the "floor" and pictures on the "wall" to make the living quarters seem like home.
They will close the door on a history of computer shutdown, near fatal collision, a fire, oxygen failure, and even overflowing lavatories - and also on one of the most astonishing adventures in space history, which tested human endurance to its limits.
After that, Mir will be empty. With no one to keep house, it will gradually become unsafe and will probably fall to earth sometime next year, 14 years after its take-off in 1986.
Mir is Russian for peace, but it also means village or world. It was born out of the Cold War space race, and it ended as a remarkable base for a new partnership in space.
In between it was home to Sergei Krikalyev, who had one of the strangest adventures of all. He went up in 1991 a Soviet officer and when he landed, the Soviet Union had fallen apart, the Cold War had ended and he was met by people in a different uniform serving a Russian flag.
Mir had once been supplied by Soviet Progress spacecraft but for years docked with US space shuttles. In its workshops and living quarters there have been British scientists - Helen Sharman went up before the Cold War officially ended - and European and US astronauts.
The US space agency, NASA, led the technological race but the Russians had the strongest card: staying power.
No American could spend more than two weeks in a shuttle. Valery Polyakov, one of the Mir team, still holds the world record for endurance with 437 days in continuous orbit, but Sergei Vasilyevich Avdeyev, one of the men coming home this week, has been up three times, logging up nearly 700 days.
Life in space is no joke. The bones leak calcium, the body stretches and muscles begin to atrophy. Cosmonauts have to be carried away from their capsules when they crash down on earth: they haven't the strength to cope with gravity.
But in space they have the same needs as other humans. They shed skin, shave off bristles and give each other haircuts; they need variety in their food and drink, they need entertainment and they need occasional spells of peace and quiet.
They need to be kept warm at night and cool in the daytime, and they need fresh air every minute of the day. All this has to be arranged in metal modules hurtling from ultra-freezing to ultra-hot every 45 minutes.
They also need room to conduct long-term experiments, to study small animals for the influence of gravity on biological processes, to grow, tend and pollinate plants and to monitor observation of the upper atmosphere.
Even when things went well, life in space was a strain. When you put something down it would drift around, ending up in some inexplicable corner. One astronaut lost his watch on the space shuttle; another found it two missions later. Shannon Lucid (53), a mother of three, lost a sneaker aboard Mir and offered a reward for the first cosmonaut to find it.
Some had problems sleeping, some found space food depressing, some felt the ultimate in travel sickness: bouts of space nausea. There were problems with the lavatories and worries about resupply as the failing Russian economy began to squeeze the space effort. There were clashes of temperament. Two people couldn't even bicker without it being monitored by ground control.
AND there was the sheer difficulty of life without gravity. "Don't sleep on the wall," US astronaut Jerry Linenger wrote feelingly from Mir to his son aged 11. "Don't eat your food upside down above the table. Don't spit your toothpaste into your towel. Don't change your clothes once every four days. Don't eat your food directly from a can. Don't go five months without a bath."
He was one of the lucky ones. He only had to cope with a fire aboard Mir: a few heart-stopping minutes of smoke, oxygen masks and fire extinguishers that didn't quite do what they should.
The next mission was the terrifying one. Michael Foale, the Lincolnshire-born NASA astronaut, took Linenger's place on Mir and on June 25th, 1997, stood horrified at the window as an unmanned Progress cargo vessel crashed into the station, ripping it open and sending it spinning out of control with the power supplies shut down and precious air hissing into space.
For weeks Foale and the two Russians slowly recovered power and life-support systems with help from a ground team led by Sergei Krikalyev - while Russian and US space chiefs bickered over the partnership's future.
It stayed intact: too much was riding on the adventure. Russia, Europe and the US are partners in the International Space Station (ISS) already being assembled in high orbit. The Russians needed US money to keep their ambitions high and the US needed the Russian partnership to justify long-term plans.
But it also stayed because Foale and his Russian colleagues made it work. "I would say that 99 per cent of the time I was basically having a good time," Foale said. He described his Russian colleagues as being "about as close to being family without being family . . ."
For a few weeks it seemed that a US businessman might find a way to finance a longer life for Mir. A Russian group say they want to make a film on it. But most people expect it to go running on empty, deteriorating, until mission controllers are forced to take the big decision. Then they will bring it down over an ocean, leaving it to burn up through the atmosphere in one last, glorious spectacular.